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UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 



AUREATE TERMS 



A STUDY IN THE LITERARY DICTION OF 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 



BY 

JOHN COOPER MENDENHALL 



A THESIS 

PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN 

PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR 

THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 



WiCKKRSHAM PRINTING COMPANY 

LANCASTER, PA. 

I9I9 



UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 



AUREATE TERMS -TTTr 



A STUDY IN THE LITERARY DICTION OF 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 



BY 

JOHN COOPER J^ENDENHALL 



A THESIS 

PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN 

PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR 

THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 



WICKBRSHAM PRINTING COMPAKY 

LANCASTER, PA. 

I9I9 



^^"i' 



aift 

JUL ?2 S^ 



n 



; PREFACE 

I have made this study in the literary diction of the fifteenth 
century for the purpose of looking further into the important 
problems that still confront one who wishes to investigate the 
development of form in English style. That there was a very 
vital feeling for form throughout the medieval period is a 
fact that has been disregarded, or too lightly touched upon, in 
most of our literary histories. Without a knowledge of these 
early canons of form, many of which survived with little or 
no change into later times, our idea of subsequent develop- 
ments is incomplete or even erroneous. 

As a beginning, I have made a topographical survey of the 
literature now available for the period, and investigated more 
particularly the influences which determined that significant 
feature of style — word-choice. In my work, I have had from 
members of the Department of English of the University of 
Pennsylvania much friendly help and counsel, which I wish 
here gratefully to acknowledge. My indebtedness is especially 
great to Professor Clarence Griffin Child, to a suggestion of 
whose the choice of theme was due, and under whose inspira- 
tion it has been completed. 

John C. Mendenhall. 

UNivixsiTY OF Pennsylvania, April, 1919. 

3 



i 1 



CONTENTS 



I 

Aureate Terms Defined 7 

II 

The Tradition of Diction in the Medieval Schools. ...... 15 

III 
How the Tradition Became English 

1. Flourished Words 29 

2. Chaucer 38 

3. The Chaucerian Succession 46 

IV 
Special Aspects of the Tradition 

1. Rhyme 50 

2. Rhythm 55 

3. Alliteration 56 

4. Translation 57 

5. Patronage 61 

V 

In Conclusion 68 

Bibliography 73 

5 



Aureate Terms Defined 

Many histories of literature, in treating of the late fifteenth 
century, make mention of the Latinical vocabulary then 
affected by authors for the purpose of dignifying their style. 
This vocabulary included many fine words which had exact, 
or nearly exact, simple synonyms, as procelle, tempest; tene- 
brous, shadowy; perdurable, lasting; puberitude, youth; and 
so on. Great numbers of them are now obsolete, as equipolent, 
ocyosite, circumfound, exute, splendidious. Obviously many 
were never used outside of the manuscripts in which they are 
found, as Haskisahle , fabrify, obnubilous.^ 

Such long and supposedly elegant words have been dubbed 
" aureate terms ", because, as Professor Saintsbury, who has 
made most frequent use of the phrase in recent years, explains 
in numerous books of his in which the subject is touched 
upon, they represent a kind of verbal gilding of literary style. 
The phrase may be traced back through various editors and 
writers, as Ingram, Horstmann, Schipper,^ all of whom em- 
ploy it in the sense of long Latinical words of learned aspect, 
used to express a comparatively simple idea. Ultimately, in 
Lydgate, at the dawn of the fifteenth century, we come upon 
the term aureate used for the first time in English as an epithet 
of praise for noble style. In his sense, which is of course de- 
rived from the similar use of aureus in late and medieval 
Latin, the word was frequently employed throughout the fif- 
teenth century and later, a use which is paralleled in the Ro- 

^ These and other like words, where not specifically assigned, are chiefly 
from fifteenth-century works, some by unknown authors, others by 
Lydgate, Metham, Caxton, etc. 

2 See the bibliography below. . 

7 



8 AUREATE TERMS 

mance tongues. The application of it to words or " terms ", 
which are so important an element of style, is a natural one. 

The question arises as to what part these terms really 
played in the literary vocabulary of the period in which they 
have been noted, and also why they were employed. The sort 
of word, long and to the average modern mind fantastic, of 
which examples were quoted above, has hitherto been most 
frequently noted in the work of the '' Chaucerians ", especially 
those of Scotland, — in the so-called '' court " poetry of the 
fifteenth century, which, most editors hasten to add, is not 
poetry at all, and which, by scrupulous editing of careless 
Mss., they generally contrive to represent as not even verse. 
It is, however, found more widely. Such an editor as J. K. 
Ingram has necessarily noted in the introduction to his texts 
of the fifteenth-century translations of the De Imitatione 
Christi, which are in prose, the occurrence of the same unusual 
sort of word. So have editors of Caxton. The same sort of 
words is also much in evidence in a fifteenth-century transla- 
tion of the famous Polychronicon, written originally in LatiU; 
by Ralph Higden, in the early part of the fourteenth century. 
Similar terms have also been discovered in numerous prefaces, 
epilogues, passages in the mystery plays, and so forth. 

The occurrence of such terms in prose as well as in verse 
seems to have stirred no great enthusiasm for a comparison. 
Neither does the fact that the " Old Version " of the De Imi- 
tatione and the translation of Higden referred to were cer- 
tainly made in the earlier half of the century prevent most of 
those who casually use the phrase " aureate terms " from 
speaking of them as if they are to be found only in the last 
years of the century and are tO' be regarded as symptomatic 
of the Renaissance. On the other hand, sober students of lan- 
guage in the abstract rather than of literature, who note the 
fact of extensive linguistic borrowing from Romance or Latin 
all through the century, do not stress the fact that much of 
this borrowing was literary, made for decorative purposes. 



AUREATE TERMS DEFINED 9 

Now as a matter of fact, this very sort of Latinical words^ 
which, if they occur in something written about 1500, are to- 
day called " aureate ", is to be found in the literature of the 
mid- fourteenth century, in the alliterative romances of that 
time. Large numbers of them could be culled from Chaucer. 
One may dip into our literature from that time down to the 
present, and find all along the way words to match with per- 
ambulant, degouted, and stellify. The merely unusual Latin- 
ical formation, which gives us a shock of surprise when we 
meet it, pleasant or annoying, as our receding classical studies 
have left us the power to comprehend it or not, will always be 
with us in English. Only yesterday, as it were, Francis 
Thompson seasoned his verse with repured, omniHc, consen- 
tient, translucencies, predilectedly, and arborous, while today 
Compton Mackenzie offers us dislusteredj rufous, mucid, in- 
spissate, caducity, transuming, feculent, tintamcir, pande- 
moniac, peregrine, and gravid. But why look to lesser folk? 
Shakespeare and Milton did not write in words of one syllable. 

It is, therefore, clear that aureate terms were not distin- 
guished from our vocabulary as a whole by their Latinity or 
their rarity. Nor can it be said that the spirit in which they 
were chosen is essentially different from that prompting the 
choice of similar words before and since. That seems to have 
been the double desire for sententiousness and ornament. The 
aim of writers then was to be both weighty in meaning and 
distinguished in expression, an aim which is naturally achieved, 
to a large degree, through word-choice.^ 

^ One should note the frequent use of sententious or equivalent terms 
in the literature of the time, e. g., 

" In fewe wordes swete and sentencious " 

Hawes, Pastime of Pleasure. 
" Depured rethoryke " 

Ihid. 
" But Lydgate's workes are fruytefull and sentencyous " 

Controversy between a Lover and a lay. 
The sententious word was looked upon as a precious ornament. 



10 AUREATE TERMS 

Is, then, the phrase " aureate terms " justifiable as the 
designation of a diction, or word-choice, of one period really 
distinct from that of others ? Only from the point of view of 
novelty, quantity, and acceptability to its time. These char- 
acteristics, however, are pronounced enough to make the dic- 
tion of the fifteenth century somewhat distinct from the 
literary diction of other ages. The difference is more apparent 
than real, but it is sufficient for purposes of separate study* 
Furthermore, for reasons stated below, it may be assumed 
that aureate terms, with these characteristics, were a marked 
feature of literary style from about 1350 to 1530. 

With regard to novelty, it should be noted that many more 
words than those now regarded in that light were novel in the 
fifteenth century. It is a common experience to readers in 
the byways of literature to find words that today pass un- 
noticed the subject, when new, of comment, even of condem- 
nation, for their rarity. Thus Thomas Nashe ridiculed Ga- 
briel Harvey for his phrase villavny by connivance. Words to 
us so simple as vapour and firmament were explained by Wil- 
liam Tyndale in his translation of the New Testament. It is 
obvious that when Chaucer put forth, for the first time in 
English, the word eternal, it would have impressed his readers 
with the same sense of novelty as eterne, also of his introduc- 
tion and still distinguished. Thus many words now familiar 
would have given fifteenth-century readers the same sensation 
that consuetude, occysion, divertycle, and facundious give us 
and gave them. 

A caution is necessary at this point. Every word that may 
have been new in the fifteenth century was not aureate. Tech- 
nical words like those found in the astronomy, alchemy, medi- 
cine and other sciences of the time are not aureate when used 
in their exact technical sense for technical purposes. Should 
such words be used in general discourse with extended or fig- 
urative meaning, adorning or making sententious the style, 



A UREA TE TERMS DEFINED j i 

they of course became aureate. In its merely technical sense 
of salve or ointment for wounds, triacle was scarcely more 
suited to dignified style than its modern descendant treacle, 
though for slightly different reasons; but since Venetian Tri- 
acle came from far, was costly, and highly prized, it was pos- 
sible to use the word with dignified effect as signifying medi- 
cine for a troubled heart or a mind diseased. Then, of course, 
the word was aureate. 

With regard to quantity, the proportion of unusual words 
employed with stylistic intent was high in the period under 
consideration. The tendency was not confined to England, 
for France had her Grandes Rhetoriqueurs, with their mots- 
dores, and Scotland has already been mentioned. In the 
latter case, the phenomenon is admittedly due, in part, to Eng- 
lish example; so far, however, as France is concerned, the 
case seems merely parallel, since the tendency was well under 
way in England before the Grandes Rhetoriqueurs began. 
Yet even admitting, as we must, that aureate terms included 
many more words than those which immediately impress us 
with their unusual quality today, their proportion to the num- 
ber of simple terms then employed by authors should not be 
considered overwhelming. Though clustered thick, especially 
in prologues (the pompously worded introduction is not yet 
an extinct species), epilogues, orotund passages, and so forth, 
and though worked into the tissue of everything stylistically 
conceived during the period named, they give at times only a 
tinge to the style, and are sometimes lacking for pages. In- 
deed, they are employed quite consciously for the purposes 
named above, being omitted if the subject is simple. 

With regard to their acceptability, we find them, at their 
start, sanctioned by what today would be called authority. 
Readers of culture and refinement accepted, even expected, 
them. When, in the course of the fourteenth century, Eng- 
lish began to be more extensively used as the language of 



12 AUREATE TERMS 

literature for a courtly class of readers, terms of aureate effect, 
as mentioned above, begin to appear. Their use increases, 
under encouraging conditions, during the fifteenth and into the 
early sixteenth century. At that time influential critics, first 
Sir John Cheke, then Roger Ascham, later Thomas Wilson, 
and still later Puttenham, all protested against the extensive 
use of new or odd words for purposes of style. " They insisted 
that the weight of a book should be in its matter; that the 
words of it should be familiar or simple, not far-fetched or 
newfangled. These precepts, as such, have generally per- 
sisted, and have had some influence on diction, though ob- 
viously they have not prevented either innovations in vocab- 
ulary or recurrent outbreaks of floridity. Nevertheless, they 
constitute a check such as was not consciously applied before 
the Revival of Learning, so that we may say, for convenience, 
that about 1530, after the death of recognized aureate writers 
like Hawes and Skelton, and the rise of a newer criticism 
'' aureation " came at least under external discipline. Sir 
Thomas Elyot (1490- 1546), who argued for the enrichment 
of English by extensive importation of fine Latinical words in 
his Boke of the Governour, in 1530, shows, under the growing 
criticism of the age, a tendency, in his later books, to use a 
somewhat simpler vocabulary.^ 

It may, then, be said that aureate terms were those new 
words, chiefly Romance or Latinical in origin, continually 
sought, under authority of criticism and the best writers, for 
a rich and expressive style in English, from about 1350 to 
about 1530. While recognizing that such a search and cor- 
responding choice was not peculiar in results to that period, 
one may, in view of its wide operation and sanction by critical 
authority during that time, assume it to have been a distinc- 
tive mark of the period, and discuss, as such, the causes of it. 

f ' 1 See the article by E. E. Hak, Jr., listed below. 



AUREATE TERMS DEFINED 



13 



Hitherto, several suggestions have been advanced for this 
preference on the part of the fifteenth century for an aureate 
vocabulary. Schipper, in his Life and Poems of William 
Dunbar (in German, Berlin, 1884), speaking more partic- 
ularly of Scotland, ascribes it to emulation of England, newly 
established classical studies, and climate! Horstmann, in his 
edition of the early six^teenth-century life of St. Werburge (E. 
E. T. S. 88, O. S.), mentions the delight then felt in the sound 
of certain terminations. Saintsbury, in his History of Eng- 
lish Prose Rhythm, implies that aureate terms are likewise 
assignable to a delight in rhythmic sound. Professor John 
M. Berdan, in an article in the Romanic Review for 19 16, 
comes nearest to the truth when he treats of how medieval 
precepts for finding rhyme, and allied study, influenced verbal 
coinages. These suggestions are all helpful for the formation 
of opinion, but not conclusive. Before proceeding, however, 
to an independent investigation, it might be well to consider 
what the age itself had to say on the point. 

Words and colours, that is, figures of speech, verbal or intel- 
lectual, were the elements then chiefly praised in style, or in 
an author's " rethorike " or " eloquence ", as the terms then 
ran. When an author's use of these moved admiration, his 
style was gay, mellifluous, curious, elect (i. e. select), dulcet, 
or aureate. These epithets seem not to have been too nicely 
differentiated ; in their general purpose they were synonymous. 
To words, or terms, as the foundation of style, they were 
frequently applied. Aureate, the most picturesque, is the one 
now best remembered. Looking, then, to Stephen Hawes, who 
at the height of the tendency defined fully what he under- 
stood by Rethorike and its elements, including especially Elo- 
cusyon, i. e. words, or diction, we find the latter, to his mind, 
such as will 



14 AUREATE TERMS 

. . . claryfy 
The dulcet speche from the langage rude, 
Tellynge the tale in termes eloquent : 
The barbary tongue it doth ferre exclude, 
Electynge words which are expedyent, 
In Latin or in Englyshe, after the entente, 
Encensyng out the aromatyke fume, 
•Our langage rude to exyle and consume.^ 

Thus it is clear that to this acknowledged exemplar of the 
aureate style, his ideal of diction included words that were 
choice and suited to the matter, preferably rare or new, at 
once exact and beautiful. Though they might be Latin or 
English, his practice shows that they were generally the for- 
mer. This exactly sums up our definition; words designed to 
achieve sententiousness and sonorous ornamentation of style 
principally through their being new, rare, or uncommon, and 
approved by the critical opinion of their time. This opinion 
was specifically embodied in the rhetorical study which had 
been continuous since classical times, and the importance of 
which to our study of medieval literature is beginning at least 
to be appreciated.^ 

1 Pastime of Pleasure, cap. XI. 

- Ebert in his Allgemeine Geschichte der Litteratur des Mittelalters im 
Abendlande (1880) clearly emphasized the importance of the study of the 
medieval Latin literature; Norden in his Antike Kunstprosa (1898) traced 
the continuity of the conscious idea of an artistic prose style from the 
time of the first Greek rhetoricians up to the beginning of the Renaissance 
in Northern Europe; and late books touching upon particular phases of 
English style, like Croll and demon's edition of Euphu£s, ascribe char- 
acteristic features of it to these inherited ideals. In English, the existence 
of these medieval canons of taste is set forth at greatest length in 
Saintsbury's History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe (vol. I). 
Their influence on authors in their time is strikingly put by Kittredge, in 
the case of Chaucer in Chaucer and His Poetry. 



II 

The Tradition of the Schools 

The ideal of the select vocabulary is practically as old as 
articulate language, and its ultimate origin indeterminate in 
time, but certain aspects of the question touch our present 
topic very nearly. Amongst the Troubadours there were two 
schools, the trobar cltis (sotil, oscur, etc.) and the trobar clar.'^ 
The former, of which Marcabrun was one of the first and 
most brilliant exemplars, deliberately sought rare and un- 
known words in developing its style. Its aims and methods, 
no doubt, became known in England, since Marcabrun' s active 
career practically coincides with the reign of Henry II, through 
whose consort, it is generally assumed, troubadour influence 
was implanted in England, but to what extent the trobar clus 
grafted his style upon our literary consciousness seems not 
now determined. For us, the chief interest of the two schools 
lies in the fact that they indicate the existence of literary dis- 
cussion and criticism based upon the fundamental of word- 
choice. Dante, in his treatise on language De Vulgari Eloquio, 
and also in his Convivio and elsewhere, plainly shows himself 
the heir of these discussions. By the Illustrious Vulgar 
Tongue he meant the cultivated dialect, especially of litera- 
ture, which he declared ' to be something that transcended 
local peculiarities, not only of place, but of time. It was de- 
veloped by conscious selection. Much of this contemporary 
constructive criticism was probably never recorded, or remains 

1 See H. J. Chaytor, The Troubadours, pp. 34-5, et alibi. 

2 De Vulg. Eloq., lib. I, cap. 16 ad Hn. 

15 



l6 AUREATE TERMS 

unknown. Enough has been gathered together, however, as 
in Saintsbury's History of Criticism,^ to convince anyone who 
glances at it that the problem of word-choice, amongst others, 
was continually being considered by medieval authors. 

But if the interesting details of the subject are imperfectly 
known, the standards to which the discussions were constantly 
referred are well-known and easy to get at. They were the 
same for all western Europe, for the fifteenth century as well 
as for the twelfth, namely, the rhetorical precepts preserved 
from classic times and, like those of grammar, known to all 
who had any education to speak of. Grammar, however, with 
a view to correctness, told rather what to avoid. It was rhet- 
oric, which, with a broader view, indicated what was elegant 
or ornamental. 

It should be remembered that Christianity was not uni- 
formly favorable to formal education. Some of the early 
Fathers, educated men themselves, argued against the mobo- 
cratic spirit which would have rejected anything marked by 
old dignity or difficult of attainment, and which adduced plaus- 
ible arguments to justify its hostility. St. Augustine coun- 
tered the argument that nothing should be studied if it had 
heathen associations by insisting that anything good in itself 
was proper for Christians to use. How far matters had been 
pushed may be implied by his illustration : that it is no reason 
to neglect the alphabet because Mercury was believed to have 
invented it. The various encyclopedias of learning that were 
made later were undertaken largely because the loss of useful 
learning was threatened as much by indifference as by the 
troubled political and social conditions of the time. 

Yet Augustine himself in his treatise on Christian education 
abandoned much of the old formalism. He insisted, rightly 
enough, that sense or spirit should be the paramount consid- 

1 Volume I treats specifically of the period reviewed here. 



THE TRADITION OF THE SCHOOLS 



17 



eration in discourse. He relaxed the old discipline in favor of 
usage ; put example above precept. He did not foresee, or did 
not care, that such principles encourage the lazy in their lazi- 
ness, the formless in their chaos. Gregory the Great, in his 
time, also laid much stress on sense as against form, though 
fond himself of equal clauses and similar endings {iso colon 
and homoio-teleuton) , and the influence of these two really 
great men was felt throughout the medieval period. Still, the 
old discipline was, to some extent, maintained always, and at 
times, in the hands of sane and forceful men, very brilliantly. 
Of course, all medieval study of this kind was primarily in 
and for Latin. Nevertheless, it was inevitable that it should 
influence the vernacular tongues. Dante, for instance, in 
speaking of vernacular Romance literature, specifically de- 
clared ^ that a poem, rightly considered, was nothing else than 
a rhetorical composition {Hctio rhetorica) set to music. 
Cicero might have set him right on the latter point. About 
eighty years after Dante's essay was written, Chaucer, in the 
prologue to the Clerk of Oxenforde's tale, speaks of Petrarch 
as one 

"... whose rethorike sweete 
Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie ..." 

This is the first reference of the kind in English, but not the 
last. The fifteenth century abounds in them, many being to 
Chaucer himself. In Chaucer's use the precise meaning of the 
term may be somewhat doubtful, but afterwards it is plainly 
directed at style, oftentimes at diction. Hence it becomes 
important to understand the significance of rhetoric at this 
time. 

Its position in the medieval curriculum of study, as the 
second or third study of the elementary Trivium, was, indeed, 
largely traditional. It was excused as being useful to preach- 

1 De Vulg. Eloq. II. 4. 



1 8 AUREATE TERMS 

ers. The teaching of it was frequently superficial in the ex- 
treme/ Still, a thorough and enlightening study of it as a 
critical guide to reading and composition cannot be said ever 
to have ceased entirely. From the late schools of southern 
Gaul it passed to Ireland and then to Great Britain, where in 
Wales it perhaps survived from Roman times. Not to linger 
over details, we notice that Bede (who wrote on this very 
subject),^ Alcuin and his pupils, Servatus Lupus, Abbot of 
Ferrieres, and Rabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda, various less 
distinguished men in the tenth century; then Bernard of 
Chartres, his pupil, William of Conches, and the great school 
of Orleans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, form a 
series, overlapping and interpenetrating, which prolonged a 
tradition that Petrarch and his contemporaries and successors 
merely revivified. In very many of the men named there was 
a genuine humanistic spirit. The tradition which thus sur- 
vived and grew in northern Europe was, of course, never lost 
in Italy, whence also it continued to spread. Weak as it may 
often have been from the fifth to the fourteenth century, it yet 
lived. For during that time not only was rhetorical study 
continuously pursued but it was constantly being adapted to 
new needs or interests. 

The nature of this latter development may be shown by 
citing three descriptions of rhetoric from the fifth, thirteenth, 
and early sixteenth centuries. The first is from that extra- 
ordinary work De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii by St. 
Augustine's pagan contemporary, the African rhetorician, 

1 See, for example, John of Salisbury, Metalogicus, lib. II, cap. ii: 
Relegi quoque Rhetoricam, quam prius . . . tenuiter auditam paululum 
intelligebam. 

2 See his little work De Schematis et Tropis, and the notices of authors 
in his De Re Metrica. In the former, he does not use the trite examples 
quoted by generations of writers on the subject, but illustrates from the 
Bible. Works, J. A. Giles, ed., Whitaker and: Co., London, 1843, vol. vi. 
Also in Halm. 



THE TRADITION OF THE SCHOOLS 19 

Martianus Capella. At the beginning of his fifth book, he 
describes the Lady Rhetoric as tall and with a face of brilliant 
female beauty; she appeared, to the flourish of trumpets and 
the noise of popular assemblies, helmeted, her head engar- 
landed with royal majesty, in her hands weapons for defence 
and to wound adversaries — weapons that flashed lightning; 
her ample cloak was embroidered with brilliant figures, and 
across her breast was a baldric set with exquisite gems. The 
weapons are obviously arguments at law, for success in which 
rhetorical training had generally been regarded as necessary 
since the time of Gorgias. 

The second citation is from the preface of a book of model 
letters by a certain Pontius Provincialis, a master at the 
famous school of Orleans. It dates from about 1259. In 
substance, the description is as follows. While the writer 
was wandering about over valleys, plains and mountains, he 
met a maiden, love of whom suddenly wounded him to the 
marrow. He describes her beauty very fully, and tells, with 
something of a troubadour's gallantry, how he besought her 
to accept him as her servitor, lest he die. Then she, looking 
at him over her shoulder with mirth in her eye, said, " If you 
hold fast what you have found ". Taking him by the right 
hand, she showed him a wonderful city with seven gates and 
eighteen palaces, to which she. Rhetoric, had the keys. The 
city, she explained, was the complete art of letter- writing.^ 

Here is nothing of the forum. So far as the description 
means anything, it is that at Orleans, in the thirteenth cen- 
tury, rhetoric was regarded as literary training for the quite 
practical purpose of learning official correspondence. At 
about the same period, as we know from several extant treat- 
ises, poetry, as a species of literary composition, was iden- 

1 Ars Dictaminis. The whole passage is quoted in Delisle's article ; also 
in Valois, De Arte, etc., cap. VI (pp. 46 et seq.). See below, p. 27. 



20 AUREATE TERMS 

tified with the same discipline. Its formal aspect was more 
prominent, its application to the written word closer, its con- 
cern with legal training and declamation correspondingly less. 
With the description from the Orleans master's book ought 
to be associated the third, from that famous allegorical poem 
by Stephen Hawes, a groom of the chamber to Henry VII. 
The seventh chapter of his Pastime of Pleasure tells how 
Graunde Amour was received of " Rethoryke, and what Re- 
thoryke is." 

Than above Logyke up we went a stay re, 
I Into a chambre gayly glorified, 

Strowed wyth floures of all goodly ayre, 

Where sate a lady gretly magnified, 

And her true vesture clerely purified, 

And over her head, that was bryght and shene. 

She had a garlande of the laurell grene. 

The last lines of the next stanza seem to imply that the poet 
had not found rhetoric so fiendish ^ as students often thought 
it in that day also. After this general description, the five 
parts into which the study was traditionally divided are all 
treated. In the midst of them is " a replication against ignor- 
aunt persones ", and at the end a commendation of the poet- 
ical triumvirate, Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate. Here we see 
how completely rhetoric had been identified in the popular 
conception with literature. Its separation from the old art of 
legal training appears still more plainly upon reverting to 
Hawes's treatment of memoria. The memorizing of a speech 
was a very necessary part of the old training for the law- 
courts or the assembly, but has very little to do with the con- 
ception of rhetoric held by Hawes. He retains the term, but 
alters its meaning. 

^ More lyker was her habitacyon 
Unto a place which is celestiall, 
Than to a certayne mancion fatall. ; 



THE TRADITION OF THE SCHOOLS 2 1 

With this general development in mind, we may proceed to 
an examination of the rhetorical precepts of diction. The 
whole subject was divided under five heads, which represented 
the natural stages in the making of a formal speech : concep- 
tion, planning, phrasing, memorizing, and delivery; or, to 
give the technical terms, inventio, dispositio, elocutvo, niemo- 
ria, and prominciatio. It was under the third head that dic- 
tion was especially treated of. According to the universal 
belief, this determined the style of the speech, or whatever it 
was, for good or bad. An interesting concrete statement of 
this belief is found in Alcuin's dialogue on the subject with 
Charlemagne. Consciously or not, the author, who is in- 
debted particularly to Julius Victor and Cicero, has the pupil, 
not the master, remark, " The plan of our discussion has now 
brought us to the point at which we inquire into the nature 
of Elocution, which confers great beauty upon the plea, and 
upon the pleader, reputation." ^ The legal contents of rhet- 
oric are especially treated of. 

In this treatise, and in all the others, insistence was laid on 
Fitness, and the powxr of words to adorn an idea.^ In a 
figure often quoted, Cicero had said,^ that just as clothes were 
first used from necessity and then became a means of adorn- 
ment, so with such use of words as metaphor, etc. This idea 
might be considered the central thought in all subsequent dis- 
cussions of the matter. Elocutio was an appropriate dressing- 
up of the subject-matter of your speech or book. 

As for the bare rules themselves, they had become nearly 
stereotyped as early as the time of Cicero. To speak in good 
Latin (that is, as the later writers defined it, according to the 

1 lam nunc nos ordo disputationis ad elocutionis deduxit inquisitionem 
quae magnam causae adfert venustatem et rhetori dignitatem. 

2 Cf. Victor, Cassiodorus, Isidore, Alcuin, etc. 

3 De Oratore, III., 38. 



22 AUREATE TERMS 

rules of grammar) ; to suit the words to the subject — fine 
words for big things, the plain term only for what was too 
terrible to be disguised; to avoid certain faults and to culti- 
vate certain virtues, especially copiousness and elegance ; these 
were, in a nutshell, the precepts of the rhetoricians. Borrow- 
ing from other languages was permitted (ne quid nimis!) ; 
formation of compounds and wholly new words allowed (with 
the same caution) ; and figurative expression much encour- 
aged. 

In detail, however, there are some interesting and signifi- 
cant differences to be noted. The last half of the fourth and 
the beginning of the fifth century saw a high- water mark 
established in rhetorical studies and a number of treatises 
produced, of which several are extant.^ Three of these are 
of peculiar interest in our inquiry : those of Gaius Cheirius 
Fortunatianus, of Sulpitius Victor, and of Gaius Julius Victor. 

The first of these presents perhaps the most points of in- 
terest. It is in the form of question and answer ; for example, 
in treating of diction it begins : Elocutio qidhus partihus con- 
stat? The answer is : Qucmtitaie verhorum et structurae quali- 
tate. With regard to words, we learn that our vocabulary 
should be large and choice. We should enlarge it by reading, 
by observation (that is, by picking up technical and profes- 
sional words), by innovation — either by borrowing or by com- 
position; but we must restrain ourselves in this, — ^and finally 
by the habit of translating. We should make it choice by 
omitting vulgarisms, archaisms, provincialisms, and the like, 
and by seeking words which, elegant in themselves, become 
more so when used in conjunction with others. The illustra- 
tion makes it plain that sound should play an important part 
in choice. Plain things should be called by plain names ; short 

^ They may be found most conveniently in C. Halm's collected Rhetores 
Latini Minores, in that section of the several works entitled Elocutio. 



THE TRADITION OF THE SCHOOLS 23 

words, it is said, are sometimes better than long. The last 
rule implies that long words and learned words were then also 
regarded popularly as making fine style. 

This, though by no means the whole of Fortunatianus's ad- 
vice, includes its most interesting features. The advice for 
extending one's vocabulary is quite orthodox today. On the 
whole, it could hardly be said that definite attempts to follow 
such precepts would result in anything unusual, unless the 
fluency contingent upon a large and semi-learned vocabulary 
proved a temptation to use recondite and out-of-the-way allu- 
sions, or words of that sort. But, it should be noted, this is 
aureateness. 

The second and third treatises referred to are alike in up- 
holding a literary as against a colloquial vocabulary. Sulpi- 
tius Victor, whose treatise, not intended for wide circulation, 
begins by limiting the older definition of rhetoric as *' the 
science of speaking well " with the differentia " in civil suits ", 
advises that, besides their other qualities, words should show 
good grooming; that is, " be not taken from mean or vulgar 
sources, or, as they say, from the street, but be chosen from 
books and drawn from the clear well of learning." This defi- 
nition is very illuminating. Gaius lulius Victor, at the end of 
his treatise, draws a distinction between conversation and 
oratory. In the former, words are chosen for the meaning 
rather than for the sound, and complicated decoration is lack- 
ing. Such an artificial distinction shows a conception of liter- 
ature bound to foster preciosity or extravagance of words as 
an idea of fitness. So, too, does a remark like that of Sulpi- 
tius, that big things should be put in big words, and that paltry 
things should not be couched in a swelling or inflated style. 
The first part of the rule is dangerous, since the second part 
is apt to be overlooked. An author is unlikely to confess 
writing " paltry " things. The tendency of all this is to favor 
ornamentation by words for its own sake. 



24 AUREATE TERMS 

Upon these late classical treatises and the earlier works 
from which they were derived (those of Cicero, especially his 
De Inventione and De Oratore, and Quintilian's Institutes), 
were founded the books on rhetoric in the three great com- 
pends of liberal education that were in use in medieval times. 
Besides the work of Martianus Capella already mentioned, 
there is that of Cassiodorus Senator (sixth century), and 
that of Isidore, Bishop of Seville, whose encyclopediac Ety- 
mologies, containing a resume of the seven liberal arts, was 
written early in the seventh century. It is not necessary here 
to dwell upon the position these works occupied in the medi- 
eval schools, even after the works of Aristotle became, in the 
thirteenth century, the foundation stones of education. In 
respect to diction Capella's rules, except for their picturesque 
setting, present nothing unusual : '* The foundations of elo- 
quence are to speak correctly and clearly; its pinnacles to be 
copious and ornate." ^ These are to be attained to by hard 
work and daily practice. The drier work of Cassiodorus and 
of Isidore, who practically recopied, with some explanations, 
his Christian predecessor's work in this field, urged, especially, 
appropriateness in style. Such words should be used (so run 
their precepts) as the matter, place, time, and audience re- 
quire: we should not use profane language to the godly, im- 
modest to the pure. ... It is not enough to speak clearly and 
smoothly, but what is said should be eloquent as well. Dressed 
up, that is, for that was what the glosses upon the text of 
appropriateness in the end generally came to. 

Such in brief were the rules of diction with which the 
schools started. To realize the more clearly the tendency of 
such principles, it would be well to notice what they tried to 

^De Nuptiis, etc., Ill (31) under Elocutio. . . . cuius Cicero duo quasi 
fundamenta, duo dicit esse fastigia. Fundamenta Latine loqui planeque 
dicere . . . fastigia vero sunt copiose ornateque dicere, quod non ingenii 
sed laboris est. . . . 



THE TRADITION OF THE SCHOOLS 25 

summarize. There were the Symmachi, Ausonius, and Bishop 
ApolHnaris, whose poems and epistles are in the most elab- 
orate and over-decorated of styles. As for the men them- 
selves whose compends were so much used, the example of 
Capella was more potent even than his precept for a style 
rhythmic and barbarically enriched : how impressive is his 
reference to the majestic thunder of Cicero's grandiloquence ! 
Cassiodorus, though he wrote dryly and meagerly enough him- 
self, shows a pretty taste in words. He praises Fortunatianus, 
to whose books on rhetoric he was himself much indebted, as 
a novel artigrapher; he recommended Felix of Gaul to the 
Senate as a novel sower of words. Isidore was praised as 
he praised others for eloquent diction. At the barbarous court 
of northern Gaul, Venantius Fortunatus at the end of the 
sixth century could write eloquent poems, prefaces and epis- 
tles, and criticize those which he received, in correct verse, 
limpidly flowing or ingeniously wrought, as seemed to him 
best. His praises of style in others defy translation. Pom- 
pous is a favorite word of his — pomposa poemata, pomposae 
facundiae iiorulenta germina, crepitantia verborum vestrorum 
tomtrua — such are his critical phrases and such the backgroimd 
of rhetorical tradition at the time of the establishment of the 
Christian medieval schools. 

Not to linger over the ingeniously enriched Latin poems 
and epistles of our English Aldhelm, whose style was formed 
perhaps by his Celtic master, himself trained in the florid 
schools of Gaul, and was later enriched by the Byzantine tra- 
ditions of the early school at Canterbury; or over traces of 
grandiloquence in Alcuin's dialogues; or even over that pre- 
mature humanist, Servatus Lupus, Alcuin's pupil, who wrote 
to the Pope for complete copies of the Mss. of the De Oratore 
and Quintilian's Institutes which he had seen at the Vatican 
(his own copies were incomplete) ; or over St. Abbo of 
Fleury, who studied the rhetoric of Victorinus, with good re- 



26 AUREATE TERMS 

suits, because its writer had taught St. Jerome that same art; 
I pass on to the twelfth century and the famous school of 
Orleans. Here the so-called Renaissance of that century had 
its center; classical literature was read, commented upon, and 
imitated. The school gave the Popes from 1159 to 1185 their 
secretaries. Alexander Neckham wrote in the next century 
that nowhere else were the songs of the Muses better inter- 
preted; the while another i\lexander (of Villadei) declared 
that Orleans was so engrossed in literature its clerks would 
never get to heaven if they didn't change their tune. Its sig- 
nificance to poets is clearly seen in that now rather famous 
allegory, Le Bataille des Sept Arts, by the trouvere, Henri 
d'Andeli, written when this early Renaissance had every- 
where else yielded to scholasticism. 

At this school, as I stated above, there was a very famous 
faculty of letter-writing which rivaled those of Italy. The 
importance of this art during the Middle Ages has been very 
well set forth by Noel Valois in a Latin thesis De Arte Scri- 
hendi Epistolas apud Galileos Medii Aevi, etc., submitted at 
the University of Paris in 1880. This little book clearly 
shows how the old rhetorical traditions of diction were trans- 
mitted to later times. Since most letters were at least semi- 
public, their style was carefully developed. Unusual words 
and resounding phrases were much sought after. The simplic- 
ity now commended in a letter was then entirely lacking. 
The old rhetorical idea that important communications to 
people of importance should be couched in magnificent style 
was pushed to its limit. The letter of Johannes Octo ^ is no 
mere tour de force. 

There is, perhaps, greater danger of underestimating than 
of overestimating the importance of the influence which this 
epistolary art had. Many collections of letters from this 

* See Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, book III. 



THE TRADITION OF THE SCHOOLS 27 

period show how thoroughly the rules had been learned. Such 
a style as that seen in the interesting letters of Walter, Abbot 
of Dervy in France, to his fellow-countryman, John of Salis- 
bury, is an excellent example. In its allusiveness, its excessive 
use of allegory, and the pompous abstractions in which it 
abounds, it is aureate diction itself. Interesting also are the 
letters, earlier in time, of Herbert of Losinga, Bishop of Nor- 
wich, — including letters of advice to students, bits of criticism, 
and numerous stylistic references. At least one word is con- 
sciously coined by their author to express in neat and dignified 
fashion a pressing idea: lihidincolas (slaves to lust) on the 
analogy of ventricolas (slaves to the belly). Such formation 
of new words, natural in language, and sanctioned by rhetoric, 
is common.^ 

Moreover, it is not unworthy of note that Dante's teacher, 
Brunetto Latini, wrote of this art, and was well-versed in it, 
as no doubt the poet was too. Chaucer was familiar with it. 
Formal letters, or bills, are not uncommon amidst the poetry 
of the fifteenth century, and during that time books on the 
subject of formal correspondence figure amongst the scanty 
possessions of Oxford students which have been recorded.^ 
No educated man was unacquainted with this " flowery '' 
style, or with praise of it. 

At the same time that this art of letter-writing became a 
science, appeared, as has also been said, several treatises on 
the art of poetry. These made use of the same general rules, 
especially as to diction. Of them the most famous is the Nova 
Poetria, itself in verse, written at the beginning of the thir- 

^ E. g., In Grosseteste's Letters, Rolls Series, 25, nos. 9, 20, 123, occur 
several rare or new words: aggratulatio, dulciiiuus, refocillatus, fulcimen- 
ium, fundamentalis, supportatio. These words occur in letters written to 
a stylistic friend and to the Regents of Oxford, which make use of much 
figurative language — a habit not so obvious in some of his other epistles. 

2 E. A. Savage, Old English Libraries, p. 278. 



28 AUREATE TERMS 

teenth century by the Englishman, Geoffrey de Vinsauf/ 
This work, with its purple patches and advice touching the use 
of rich figurative diction, had been read by Chaucer, and 
though he gibes at it, he was not insensible of its merits — in 
their place. Many authors of the fifteenth century knew and 
praised the work and its author: it harmonized with their 
taste. Hoccleve, Lydgate, Bokenham, and other versifiers, 
some anonymous, are on the list. Indeed, his *' colours pur- 
purate of rethoryke " are of a sort to be remembered. 

Thus it is clear that ideas of decorative diction did not 
grow faint or fail with classical antiquity. They persisted, 
and became, if anything, stronger.^ Decorated style was 
considered fine style, and in select words especially was sup- 
posed to lie the power to adorn. This particular thought was 
given wide currency by the letter-writing art and the study of 
versification in the twelfth century and later. The rules them- 
selves are well known and were illustrated by examples spec- 
ially designed as models of ornateness. They were re-enforced 
by reading of the classical literature most in favor, such as 
Ovid, Martial and Seneca (despite Quintilian's censure). 
The perfervid style of the constantly read Church Fathers, 
and that of the admired Boethius, written under the same 
traditions, had the same effect. This is the ground from 
which the " aureate " style of the fifteenth century was 
nourished. 

^ Nova Poetria, ii. 743 ff. The opening advice is: Consider sense first, 
form last. Observe fitness. . . . iRich thought is honored by rich diction; 
let not the influential matron go blushing for shame in ragged gown, etc. 
745. Verbi prius inspice mentem, 

Et demum faciem ... 
760. Dives honor etur sententia divite verho; 

Ne rubeat matrona potens in paupere panno. 
2 Cf. Croll, Introduction to his Euphues, p. xxviii, and the reasons there 
given. 



Ill 

How THE Tradition Became English 

I. FLOURISHED WORDS 

There is no lack of evidence that the theories of diction 
just discussed had an appHcation in general literature. In 
establishing this point, we should remember that the medieval 
literature in Latin is an organic part of the whole. Indeed, 
except in England, it is the only literature of note in western 
Europe before the eleventh century, and in England the early 
vernacular literature owes it a great debt, both in translation 
and in inspiration. Furthermore, although, from the twelfth 
century onward, the vernacular literature everywhere assumed 
increasing importance, Latin, and not for learned purposes 
alone, was a powerful force, with a living tradition, until well 
on in the seventeenth — and, indeed, is scarcely dead now. 

All this Latin writing was consciously influenced by the 
school ideas of style. One of the earliest extant Latin com- 
positions by an Englishman, Eddius, a contemporary biog- 
rapher of St. Wilfrid, the apostle to the West Saxons, begins 
with an apology for the slenderness of the author's under- 
standing and eloquence. Aldhelm, nearly contemporary with 
Eddius, is distinguished for his rhetorical ingenuity and 
" precious " diction. Bede is more restrained, but shows no 
less interest in style. He praised Aldhelm, and wrote on the 
subject, (v. sup.) Alcuin, a little later, carried letters to the 
Continent, lecturing, in a heightened style, to Charlemagne. 
Willibald, his contemporary, writing the life of St. Boni- 
face, pretends a distinct sensitiveness to diction. He speaks 

29 



30 AUREATE TERMS 

of lively narration, of elegantly allusive phrasing (eleganti 
verborum amhage), and deprecates his own pinched style in 
writing of such a subject as only heralds should handle. Yet 
his work comes up to his ideals pretty well. After the time 
of these brilliant scholars, in spite of the sorrowful laments 
of Alfred and of Aelfric the '' Grammarian ", Latin never 
ceased either to be read or written. The tenth century pro- 
duced one distinctly *' aureate " stylist whose name has sur- 
vived — the historian Aethelwerd, long noted for his showy 
diction, but that there were others is plain from the reference 
in Malmesbury's preface to a writer of Aethelstan's reign. 
{v. inf.) 

In Anglo-Norman times the Latin literature of England 
was very brilliant. Letter-writing has been mentioned above. 
Geoffrey of Monmouth influenced the literature of the whole 
west. The line of genuine historians, beginning with William 
of Malmesbury, deserves more than passing mention, and not 
for their matter alone. Giraldus Cambrensis, John of Salis- 
bury, Geoffrey de Vinsauf (already mentioned), Alexander 
Neckham, Walter Map, Roger Bacon — to name only the 
greatest — may be claimed as ours, though their genius is 
almost cosmopolitan. The Philohihlon, in praise of literature, 
written during Chaucer's boyhood by Richard de Bury, who 
was known to Petrarch, a work unique in medieval times, is 
the production of an Englishman. 

In all the writers named, intimate references to style and 
diction are to be found : in some of them, frequently. Even 
scientists like Roger Bacon, not primarily interested in the 
ideal of belles-lettres, still, like Huxley in recent times, were 
not indifferent to the claims of style. In his Opus Tertium, 
for instance, sent by request to Pope Clement IV, he wrotfe: 
*' Knowledge without eloquence is a sharp sword in a hand 
powerless to wield it . . . the objects of a public speaker or 



HOW THE TRADITION BECAME ENGLISH 



31 



writer are three : to set forth the truth, to please, to influence ; 
and to these objects three styles correspond : the simple, the 
medium, the grand. My chief purpose is to set forth the 
truth, and therefore, according to writers on eloquence (I ex- 
press myself) in the simple style without verbal panoply/' ^ 
Curiously apposite to our subject now is a reference in the 
twelfth or early thirteenth century life of Harold, last of the 
Saxon kings, a work which, " rejecting all rudeness of 
speech", wished to see its theme expressed in an elegant style, 
for literature had also its fine artificers, goldsmiths, brass- 
workers, and carvers.^ Most interesting of all, in view of the 
limitation of our subject to England, is a reference in the 
second chapter of the first book of William of Malmesbury's 
Gesta Regum Anglorum. In speaking of Aldhelm as first 
abbot of the Celtic-founded monastery which in his own time 
his own genius adorned, he remarked, half in defence of Aid- 
helm, that various nations develop national styles. The ten- 
dency of the English is to express themselves pompously.^ 

History, according to numerous prefaces, justified itself to 
the medieval mind by its useful moral examples. And be- 
cause of its importance as literature, it was allowed, as rhet- 

^ Opus Tertium, cap. I (Rolls 15, p. 4). Sapientia sine eloquentia est 
gladius ac tutus in manu paralytici . . . cum enim tria sint opera oratoris, 
ut veritatem aperiat, ut delectat, ut Uectat . . . tres styli correspondent, 
humilis, mediocris, grandis . . . non intendo principaliter nisi veritatem 
aperire et ideo se£undum auctores eloquentiae humili stylo sine verborum 
phaleris. All this is St. Augustine's teaching, De Doctrina Christiana, IV. 
7. 16-20, and ultimately Cicero's {Orator). 

^ See Michel, Chroniques Anglo-Normandes, vol. ii (1840); reprinted 
in vol. xvi of the Caxton Society publications: Lives of Anglo-Saxons. 
The Latin runs thus: sententiam (si videhitur) reserventes elegantiori, 
ut dignum est, stilo explicandam; nee enim desunt, largiente Domino, coetui 
sanctitatis vestrae Beseleelis, Ooliab, seu Hyram peritissimi successores. 

^ Denique Graeci involute, Romani circumspecte, Galli splendide, Angli 
pompatice dictare solent. 



32 AUREATE TERMS 

oric declared was proper, a pleasing and impressive style/ 
Many writers of history abused this privilege. Malmesbury, 
himself a professed stylist, makes many references to the style 
of others, not always to approve. Thus, in speaking of a con- 
temporary Latin history of the great king Aethelstan (c. 924), 
he says it was just what Cicero defined as bombast in diction.^ 
He remarks (Praef.) that Aethelward (who died c. 988), in 
searching after sounding and far-fetched phrases, ship- 
wrecked his intention of making a good connected Latin his- 
tory out of old scattered chronicles, a task which, if divine 
favor smiled upon him, he himself promised to perform.^ 
Yet no doubt such diction was admired by some in its time, as 
it certainly would have been later. Malmesbury himself was 
quite capable of grandiloquence. Lesser men, in writing local 
monastic chronicles and hagiographies, show, like provincial 
reporters, much more of the latter quality when, as is not in- 
frequently the case, they make any stylistic pretense at all.* 

That choice or exalted diction was one of the principal 
features of this style is quite distinctly stated, in the fourteenth 
century, by Ranulfus Higden, who, in the exalted preface of 
his Polychronicon, asks why inter caeteros . . . ac sesqui- 
pedalium verhorum eiHatores . . . nostri non erunt laudi 

* See Eadmer, Richard of Cirencester, the Flores Historiae, the Eulogium 
Historiae, etc., etc. The last named contains interesting personal reasons 
of the author for writing history that throw a vivid light on certain 
phases of monastic hfe. 

^ eo dtcendi genere quod suffultum rex facundiae Romanae Tullius in 
rhetoricis appellat. See Gesta Regum Anglorum, lib. II, cap. 6, 132. 

^The Latin of the passage about Aethelward runs as follows: Haec ita 
poUiceor si conatui nostra divinus favor arriserit, et me praeter scopulos 
confragosi sermonis evexerit ad quos Elwardus dum tinmila et emendicata 
verba venatur miserahiliter impegit. 

*A very good example will be found in that part of the Eversham 
Chronicle which was written by Prior Dominic, especially in the Prologus 
to the life of Egwin, the patron saint of the house. It is argued that 
eloquence is not heretical. Time, first half of the twelfth century. 



HOW THE TRADITION BECAME ENGLISH 



33 



digni . . . dijnensoresF In translating this, Trevisa, neglect- 
ing the rhetorical question in which the idea is couched in his 
original, wrote, *' Wherefore, among othere noble travaillours 
of the thre pathes and f aire florischers and highteres of wordes 
and of metre ... we mowe nought ful preyse (historians)." 
This association of long, impressive words as an element of 
style with those educated in the Trivium, for that is the 
" thre pathes ", is noteworthy. Trevisa's picturesque word 
for such men, '' florischers ", may be taken as a current Eng- 
lish term for inveterate users of a superfine or " aureate " 
vocabulary, and used as a clue to their presence in the vernac- 
ular literature of the fourteenth century. 

Acting upon this hint, we discover at the very outset of the 
century (c. 1303), in Robert Mannyng of Brunne's transla- 
tion of William of Wadington's French Manuel des Pechiez, 
" flourished words " spoken of as a form of one of the Seven 
Deadly Sins, Pride. Evil shall betide thee, warns the author, 
if " yn thin queynte wurdys hast pryde ", and he adds, a little 
later, 

Yn feyre wurdys and yn queytite 

With pryde are swych men ateynte; 

Flourshed wurdys and otherwhile lovely 

Are ful of pryde and trechery. 

In these lines Mannyng is attempting to render the French 
beal langage and heal parler, phrases which seem near akin to 
Rhetoric, the ars bene dicendi. 

In Trevisa's own time, late in the century, the same expres- 
sion is found in Wiclif's sermons. In one of his countless de- 
nunciations of the friars, he declares that they deprave them- 
selves to their parishioners " bi florisshed wurdys that thei 
bryngen yn ". Like Chaucer's Pardoner, they evidently be- 
lieved in " saffroning " their " predication ". Elsewhere, in 
speaking of the begging of the friars, Wiclif uncompromis- 
ingly declares, "And this chaffair is sellinge of preching, how- 



34 AUREATE TERMS 

ever that it be florished ". From a sentence accompanying 
the first of these two references ^ it is plain that the friars 
derived their style in sermonizing from the precepts of rhet- 
oric; the latter reference is obviously to a sort of euphemism 
used to glose over an ugly fact. 

Can we know more particularly the nature of '* flourished 
words " ? '' Flourishing " of words might refer to any bom- 
bastic or exaggerated phrasing, but " flourished words " were 
apparently words of a certain kind. They were obviously 
pretentious words, unusual words, or words finer, often, than 
their critics deemed necessary. 

Their nature, I believe, can be ascertained exactly. Until 
well within the fourteenth century, the native English vocab- 
ulary was still quite distinct from the French-Latin. This 
was particularly true of religious diction. The early thir- 
teenth-century English treatise on the Vices and Virtues, con- 
temporary with the Brut and the Ormulum, has, if possible, 
fewer than they of Latin-derived words. Forms like heved- 
sennes for cardinal sins, mihte for virtue, swynk for labour 
{toil or work), dierne for secret, and so forth, indicate a 
vocabulary nearly as pure as any purist could desire. 

The Genesis and Exodus, written about the middle of the 
same century, 

With londes speche and wordes smale, 

contains about half a hundred different Romance terms. 
These are for the greater part technical, and so in no sense 
stylistic ; not a few indeed, like hissop or crisme, of such long 
standing in English that no one would ever give a thought to 
their foreign origin, or think them in any sense unusual. It 
is interesting to note how the word bigamy (bigame) is 
glossed in the text itself of this work (partly, perhaps, to pre- 
vent confusion with English game) : 

On engleis tale, twie-wifing. 
1 De Officio Pastorale, 26. v. E. E. T. S., 74 O. iS., p. 445. 



HOW THE TRADITION BECAME ENGLISH 



35 



Such glossing of Romance terms, even those soon destined to 
become famiHar, was common much later. Pardon was ex- 
plained, in its technical sense, in writing, after it must have 
been familiar to the ear, as forgiveness, and, in the fourteenth 
century, inobedience as unbuxomness. 

Robert Manny ng's own bungling attempt to explain 
" manual ", which in his French original is clearly described 
as a little book that can be carried in the hand, by handlyng, 
and Dan Mitchel's title, so strange to modern ears, Ayenbite 
of Inwyt for Remorse of Conscience, show the same repug- 
nance to Romance terms. The vocabulary of the latter work 
is studiously English. It contains words like boc-hottse for 
library, vor-speche for prologue, poure of goste for poor of 
spirit, and so forth. 

Just when this tendency to restrict themselves to native 
roots or compounds ceased to control the diction of popular 
religious writers — it never died out entirely, though it should 
not be confused with mere simplicity — it is difficult to say. 
The Ancren Riwle, written for ladies of gentle birth, who 
were supposed tO' know Latin, is cited as earliest authority in 
English for a number of new words derived from French, or 
French-Latin sources: e. g., comfort, delight, liquor, etc. A 
century later, Hampole's diction, in similar case, is clearly 
Latinized. In works certainly his are to be noted the earliest 
surviving occurrences of many fine words like accusour, com- 
punction, constrain, crystalline, disease (vb.), fruitless, 
glorify, incorrigible, mortality, protestation, reprehend, sub- 
tlety, etc., etc. It has been said that, like the Wiclifites, he 
deliberately avoided " strange English " and, by his own 
confession, sought " the easiest and commonest, and such as 
is most like the Latin ".^ It would seem that the exalted 

1 John Stoughton, Our English Bible, its Translations and Translators, 
Scribners, n. d., p. 38. No reference is given. 



36 AUREATE TERMS 

mood in which Hampole's compositions were conceived, and 
his facility of expression in both Latin and English, caused 
him to take the words nearest him. Something also bonae 
sonoritatis in them corresponded to his favorite mood of 
mystic exaltation. The epithet " mellifluous " was applied by 
commentators more appropriately to his work than to that of 
some others. 

Some of his words, like grace , levation, temptation, etc., 
represent an irresistible drift towards the use of familiar 
ecclesiastically *' technical " terms of Latin (or French-Latin) 
form in preference to English. Wiclif and those who labored 
with him, or after him, in translating the Bible, show an 
accentuation of the tendency to use such familiar words rather 
than to make strange native compounds. 

But not entirely. If the archaic verse Psalter is really 
Hampole's work, it shows that when not writing in a dis- 
tinctly individual vein, or to certain individuals, Hampole 
imitated the earlier usage. Horstmann points out some errors 
in this work which indicate that its author was not entirely 
familiar with older English diction. The Purvey-Wiclif 
translation of the Bible, especially as first conceived, used such 
expressions as agam-buying for redemption, again-rising for 
resurrection, boroughtown for city, comeling for stranger, etc. 
In the next century, Pecock, in his unfortunate Repressor, 
occasionally yielded to the old notion. So, later, did Sir John 
Cheke in his translation of Scriptural passages. The Human- 
ists then began to generalize the notion by emphasizing the 
precept that our words should be " proper " to the tongue in 
which we speak, though they conceded that borrowed words 
might be naturalized. Dryden and others of our so-called 
classicists theorized about the point. The last century saw in 
William Barnes and others a distinct '' movement " to reduce 
English to complete Saxon impurity. Except, however, to a 
few enthusiasts, the movement has made no strong appeal. 



HOW THE TRADITION BECAME ENGLISH 37 

In contrast to the earlier, these later practices are sporadic, or 
purely academic. The earlier habit of choosing only native 
words was, as applied to popular religious writing, an effort 
to comply with a then powerful living taste and need. 

In other forms of writing, such as romance and history, 
there was not quite the same conservatism. In these, many 
things were called by their Romance names because they could 
have no other. But at first the difference between the two 
vocabularies was strongly felt there also. Thus, in the rhymed 
chronicle of Robert of Gloucester (c. 1297), a work whose 
vocabulary as a whole has a perceptible Romance tinge, in the 
familiar passage calling attention to the bilingual condition of 
English society as something incongruous, the author uses the 
term ** high-men ", as if to illustrate his point, though he 
knew the terms nobles and noblay, and used the latter some 
ten times in his book. The entire passage contains no Ro- 
mance word. 

It is clear then that in a normal English vocabulary any 
new, unexpected, or unexplained Romance terms would have 
been very noticeable. " Flourished words " ordinarily would 
have been such less usual Romance or Latin-derived words, 
often long words, sesquipedalia verba, the antithesis of 
*' londes speche and wordes smale ". It is no contradiction of 
this conclusion that Wiclif, who condemned " flourished 
words ", used many Romance words himself. Those he em- 
ployed were chiefly technical or such as had become current in 
his own time, and did not, therefore, attract much attention. 

Thus the " flourished words " of the fourteenth century 
were the forerunners of the " aureate terms " of the fifteenth. 
Furthermore, Wiclif 's clause '' that they bririgen in ", and his 
attribution of rhetorical intention to the friars, imply that 
with them, at least, rhetoric was an active cause in the devel- 
opment of an ostentatious Latinized vocabulary. 



38 AUREATE TERMS 

2. CHAUCER 

All this development, however, was in a sense merely pre- 
liminary. It was Chaucer, who, according to the universal 
opinion of his age, really gave us a stylistic vocabulary. At 
first, his innovations were regarded with nothing but admira- 
tion, but later the curious idea arose that his introduction of 
Romance terms had '' corrupted " the language. This notion 
was persistently held, and still may be, by many people who 
labor under the mistaken impression that no language should 
borrow from another any word for which it has itself, or 
could possibly make, a synonym. Defenders of Chaucer then 
attempted to prove that he was no more addicted to using 
Romance terms than were his contemporaries. G. P. Marsh 
many years ago summed up the case thus : '' it is by no means 
the proportion of foreign words which distinguishes his poems 
from the common literary dialect of the time. It is the selec- 
tion of his vocabulary, and the structure of his periods that 
mark his style as his own." ^ Since that was written, the pub- 
lication of the New English Dictionary has made it possible 
to test Chaucer's vocabulary from the point of view of style, 
or selection, with greater exactness. 

While studying the language of Chaucer's great tragedy, 
Troilus and Criseyde, which he acknowledges to have been 
written according to the rules of art,^ I was struck by the 
number of words amongst those which might be considered 
novel and impressive in their usage now or in Chaucer's time, 
that began with the letter E. Upon looking up the number of 
words beginning with that letter which the New English Dic- 
tionary records as introduced into English prior to 1400, I 

'^Lectures on the English Language, VII (Scribners, 1867, p. 169). 
^ See his final charge to his book : " Subgit be to alle poeseye ! " (V. line 
1750). 



HOW THE TRADITION BECAME ENGLISH 39 

found that almost half of them, about one hundred and ten/ 
were either used for the first time by Chaucer, or given a new 
application by him. If, according to Skeat, new words in 
English prior to 1400 are especially to be looked for under the 
letters J, V, P, C, and E, it is obvious how large was Chau- 
cer's contribution. A more general test, chiefly for Troilus 
and Criseyde and the Boece, yielded similar results. Of one 
hundred and fifty selected words, seventy were cited as en- 
tirely new with Chaucer, while a score of the remainder were 
by him used for the first time in new or extended figurative 
senses.^ The investigation of Dr. Reismueller, referred to 
below, reveals some interesting comparative facts. Of words 
used by Lydgate which are recorded as having been previously 
used by only one author, three are found in Mannyng, eight 
in Hampole, thirty-five in Trevisa, thirty-one in Gower, and 
about one hundred and Hfty-nine in Chaucer. These figures 
indicate, not simply that Lydgate found Chaucer more inter- 
esting to read, but that Chaucer had an unusual vocabulary. 
The Chaucer Dictionary will presently show the exact degree 

^For example: elate, envelop (verb), envoi, envy (verb), epicycle, equal, 
equation, equator, equinoctial, equinox, erect, err, erratik, eschaufe, es- 
pecial, espial, espice, establish, estimation, eternal, eterne, eternity, exalta- 
tion, examining (noun), exceed, exception, exchange (noun), excusation, 
execute, execution, executrice, exempt (adj.)> exerce, exer citation, exist- 
ence, expert, express (adj.), extend, and so forth, all first uses, some, of 
course, technical. 

^ The list includes : abusioiin, accident, accordable, accusacyon, adiust, 
adverse, advertence, aliene, ambages, amiable, amenuse, argument, aspre, 
audience, bestialite, combust, conject, counterpese, curacioun, defet 
(= "done out"), defusioun, delicacy, delicate, determine, disaventure, 
disfigure, dispone, disseveraunce, dissimule, disturne, fervently, fortunate, 
governaunce, imperial, lethargy, mansuete, martial, moleste, mortal, 
painture, palestral, palpable, parodie, participation, p erdurability , perturbe, 
perturbation, pervert, pietus, plit, propinquity, reconfort, redress, reiigure, 
revoke, sentement, suasion, and some already listed above under E. 
Those of the words noted in verse occurred m.ostly within the line, 
not as rhymes. 



^O AUREATE TERMS 

of Chaucer's innovation, but the facts just cited to some ex- 
tent anticipate the general nature of its revelation in this par- 
ticular. 

Thus we have firm ground to stand upon in judging what 
Chaucer's own near contemporaries said of his language. It 
is not necessary to recapitulate here what has been so well set 
forth elsewhere : ^ the chorus of universal praise that echoed 
through the century after Chaucer's death, the century pre- 
eminently of aureate diction. John Lydgate early called the 
style ** gay ", an epithet frequently used later for diction (see 
Caxton's prefaces, for example). Henry Scogan (c. 1407) 
called it "curious" (i, e. carefully made, ingenious). Later, 
Robert Henryson, amongst others, spoke specifically of the 
** gudelie termis " of Troilus and Criseyde, and William Dun- 
bar summed up the common opinion of " the golden rose of 
rethors " and his style when he characterized Chaucer's words 
as " fresch anamalit termis celicall ". There can be no doubt 
that Chaucer's successors regarded him as a great rhetorician, 
and in so doing bestowed upon him the highest praise in their 
power. 

For that term meant to them all that artist implies today. 
They recognized that which the greatest modern critics so well 
insist upon: Chaucer's artistry. They understood that he 
worked within a great tradition, yet they were by no means 
blind to the independence that he achieved within it. Trained, 
nearly all of them, in the tradition of the ancient schools, they 
naturally applied their time-honored precepts to Chaucer's 
work, yet they were men, like us, and were stirred or moved 
to admiration by much the same things as we. Granted that 
their feelings were similar to ours, the language they used in 
expressing them is not so essentially different that we can 
safely assume that they were bad judges. 

^ Spurgeon, Five Centuries of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion. 



HOW THE TRADITION BECAME ENGLISH 41 

To what extent was Chaucer himself influenced, in forming 
his vocabulary, by the rhetorical principles which his succes- 
sors found illustrated in his practice ? That Chaucer was well- 
versed in the principles of the rhetorical tradition is certain. 
He was no untaught wonder. We know that he was not only 
a wide reader, but a critical ; he was interested in, the manner 
as well as in the matter of his reading. The specific evidence 
now at hand on this point is quite conclusive. 

There is, for instance, his knowledge of that once famous 
master of rhetoric who has been referred to above, and whose 
name has occasionally been confused with his own — Geoffrey 
de Vinsauf, Galfridus Anglicus. Tyrwhitt is credited with 
having first called modem attention to the Nova Poetria as the 
source of Chaucer's reference in a well-known passage in the 
Nun-Priesfs Tale — the invective against Friday as an unlucky 
day.^ Professor Kittredge has identified a direct translation 
of another passage (lines 44-46) from the same work, the 
lines in the Troilus (I. 1065-69) reading: 

For every wight that hath an hous to founde 
Ne renneth not the werk for to beginne 
With rakel hond ; but he wol bide a stounde, 
And send his hertes line out fro withinne. ... 2 

It is possible. Professor Kittredge says, that the passage in 

the Squire's Tale about oral delivery of a message, especially 

the lines, 

Accordant to his wordes was his cheere, 

As techeth art of speche hem that it lere. . . . 

may have been suggested by de Vinsauf 's lines on this topic. ^ 

1 Canterbury Tales, B 4537-41. 

2 See Modern Philology, vol. vii (1909-10), pp. 481-3. De Vinsauf 's 
lines are as follows : 

Si quis habet fundare domum, non currat ad actum 
Impetuosa manus : intrinseca linea cordis 
Praemetitur opus, seriemque sub ordine certo. 
^ Tales, F. 98-104. Cf. Nova Poetria, 2022-58. 



42 AUREATE TERMS 

In addition to these passages, I would call attention to de Vin- 
sauf's striking lines advising that a speaker be represented in 
a story by his own words just as he utters them, which is cor- 
roborative of Chaucer's own theory so forcefully expressed 
in The Canterbury Tales (Prologue, 725-42)/ Proverbs, 
which are so noticeable in the Troilus, especially in the conver- 
sation of Pandarus, are much praised in the Nova Poetria and 
similar medieval treatises. Altogether, it would seem that 
Chaucer had not read de Vinsauf inattentively, nor in a de- 
risive spirit. 

O'n the contrary, his interest in such critical discussions 
seems to have been keen. Professor Lowes has traced the 
famous reference to change in language, which occurs in the 
beginning of the second book of Troilus (II. 22-25), 

Ye know eek that in form of speech is change 
Within a thousand yeer, and wordes tho 
That hadden pris, now wonder nice and straunge 
Us thinketh hem ; and yit they spake hem so. . . '. 

to Dante's Convivio,^ and very likely other of his critical dicta 
had their place in the literary discussions of his age. That he 
should have used in this way the gathered wisdom of past 
ages and his own in forming his style, is more natural and 
quite as admirable as that he should have done what some 
people think geniuses do : spun it entirely from his own vitals 
like a spider. 

We may note also his direct references to rhetoric in his 
most mature work, The Canterbury Tales. Four of the most 
significant are put into the mouths of the Clerk, the Franklin, 
the Squire, and the Nuns' Priest. The Clerk's reference, ac- 

^Cf. Nova Poetria, 1266-67: 

En ahum florem personae : quando loquenti 
Sermo coaptatur, redolentque loquela loquentem. 

''See Modern Philology, vol. xiv (1916-17), p. 710. 



HOW THE TRADITION BECAME ENGLISH 



43 



cording to the New English Dictionary, is probably the first 
free use in English of the term rhetoric as synonymous with 
literary style. The Clerk speaks of Petrarch as one 

. . . whos rethorike swete 
Enlumnyd al Ytaille of poetrie. . . . 

The Squire cannot do justice to his heroine's charms; it would 
need a rhetorician with all the " colors '" of his art to do that. 
The Franklin, a plain man, is similarly handicapped. The 
Nuns' Priest gibed at De Vinsauf . The last reference has been 
supposed to express Chaucer's personal opinion of the Nova 
Poetrm. This view, in consideration of the evidence cited 
above, is scarcely justified. The gibe is necessary to the tone 
of the story, and suited to the character of the Priest — just as 
the other references are to those who make them. 

Professor Kittredge, in his admirable book Chaucer and 
His Poetry, has made so plain Chaucer's use of his rhetorical 
knowledge in the structure of all his work that it is unneces- 
sary to pursue the general subject further. I shall pass on to 
the particular matter of word-choice, and note to what extent 
that was accordant to the principles of rhetorical art as then 
interpreted. 

Nothing could be more obvious than that Chaucer chose his 

words according to their fitness. Especially is this true of the 

" high style ". The Man of Law's Tale and the Troilus are 

singled out as two of his works conceived in a lofty spirit, 

and their diction, particularly in the latter, is appropriately 

dignified. The effect of the former upon a typical intelligent 

auditor of the time, a plain and downright man, is represented 

in the words of Harry Bailey, the host, at the conclusion of 

the story : 

This was a thrifty tale for the nones. . . . 
I se wel that ye lemed men in lore 
Can moche good, by Goddes dignite! ^ 

^ Tales, B 1165; 1 168-9. 



44 



AUREATE TERMS 



Even more to the point for a study of diction is the effect of 
the Doctor's tale. Much moved, mine host invokes a blessing 
on the teller, and on the utensils, and even on the terms of his 
art, until he feels himself a little incoherent — 

Seyde I nat wel, I kan nat speke in terme? 

Too frank to be satirical, he recovers himself by a half -jest 
about the cardynacle he has so nearly incurred that he must 
have a triacle, viz. " of moyste and corny ale ".^ Thus the 
strain of sentiment is relaxed, but in the meantime, fine words 
have inspired imitation. 

Yet Chaucer had no special theory that one kind of word is 
better than another. He believed more in the spirit than in 
the letter, and at times deliberately simplified his language. 
In line 12 18 of the fourth book of the Troiltis, for instance, 
Chaucer first used the infinitive conforte. At this point he 
was following his original, Boccaccio's Filostrato, and from 
that took the word. Later, perhaps carelessly, he changed 
the word to to glad. Had Chaucer, and not, presumably, some 
irresponsible scribe with a penchant for fine words, written 
" The auricomous Phebus " found in V. 8 of Had. Ms. 3943,^ 
it would have represented an interesting heightening of the 
style in the rhetorical prologue to a book. The accepted read- 
ing is " gold- (y) tressed ", supplying the participial prefix 3;. 
" Auricomous " is metrically exact. It is interesting to note 
further Chaucer's careful habit in the Boece of translating 
literally the highly figurative meters, and then explaining them 
in simple language — the third of the second book is a good 

1 V. Tales, € 287 et seq. 

2 The same Ms. contains similar curious readings, such as laur{i)gerus 
for laurer- crowned (V. 1107). 



HOW THE TRADITION BECAME ENGLISH 45 

example. This is like his trick in the Tales of describing night 
poetically, and concluding, 

This is as muche to seye, as it was nyght.^ 

Yet at other times he wrote thus without any gloss.^ Ob- 
viously, he was master of his rules, not they of him. 

It would be interesting to trace, if possible, some of Chau- 
cer's effective words to their source, to ascertain which, if 
any, have a distinct origin in rhetoric, but when one remem- 
bers how difficult it is to recall where or how he learned most 
of his own words, even the most unusual, he will probably de- 
spair of tracing Chaucer's. Chaucer' favorites eternity and 
eterne, which he may be said to have introduced into English, 
he learned doubtless from Boethius. Certain others first used 
by him in English occur in Geoffrey de Vinsauf, notably: 
dbusioun, which occurs in the Nova Poetria several times 
close together; expert, and defusion, an uncommon word, 
which occur in one of the two passages of the Latin poem 
with which there can be no question that Chaucer was famil- 
iar; mansuete (first used by him to describe Criseyde), which 
occurs in a passage telling how to describe a woman. Chaucer 
was familiar with such passages, and not unlikely with this 
very one. Again, the highly effective epithet erratik (the 
erratik sterres) at the end of Troil'us is borrowed literally 
from Boccaccio.' In like manner, the source of many other 
of his words might be traced or surmised, but the origin of 
most must remain undiscovered. 

It is sufficient to observe how many genuinely fresh and 
new terms Chaucer used. To his contemporaries, this fresh- 
ness was naturally more obvious than to us. By example and 

^Franklin's Tale, F 1016-18. 

2 e. g. Merchant's Tale, E 1795-99, etc. 

3 Troilus, V. 1 812. 



46 AUREATE TERMS 

even by precept they observed him to have chosen his words 
with care and, in the truest sense, to have adorned his matter. 
It could not have escaped their attention that his new words, 
so happily used, were chiefly borrowed from courtly French 
or learned Latin. All this accorded with the literary stand- 
ards taught by rhetoric. So great and safe a guide, therefore, 
they never hesitated to follow as they could. 

3. THE CHAUCERIAN SUCCESSION 

The effect of Chaucer's example is clearly visible in the 
work of his younger contemporaries and immediate succes- 
sors. Foremost among them is his professed disciple Lyd- 
gate. The vocabulary of that most prolific writer has been 
painstakingly checked up by Dr. Georg Reismueller of Mun- 
ich with interesting results. The intention was to list all the 
words from French or Latin which Lydgate first used in 
English. The result is a total of over eight hundred words, 
the larger number of which are truly new borrowings or for- 
mations. Some, while not discovered earlier in English books, 
are quite natural developments of words already in use. One, 
at least, seems in error — entermail, which I believe to be a 
mere variant of entermele (=; intermingle). Yet whatever 
allowances are made, the total number of genuinely new words 
employed by Lydgate is distinctly impressive. They are, 
moreover, generally striking and apposite. 

In addition, Lydgate culled many choice words from his 
literary predecessors. Words first noted in Hampole, Trevisa, 
Gower, and others. Dr. Reismueller points out, are found next 
in him. But in particular, as stated above, he drew lavishly 
upon the treasury of Chaucer, especially upon the stylistic 
Troilus. 

That this was conscious borrowing and not mere absorp- 
tion, appears most certainly from Lydgate's frank confession 



HOW THE TRADITION BECAME ENGLISH 



47 



of how he used Chaucer. When, in the Troy Book, he at- 
tempted to describe Cressida, he was naturally reminded of 
Chaucer's great tragedy, and he acknowledges that he needs 
must crave his master's help, 

And seke his boke, that is left behynde, 
Som goodly words therein for to fynde, 
To sette among the crokid lynys rude 
Which I do write; as by similitude, 
The ruby stant, so royal of renoun, 
Withinne a ryng of copour or latoun.^ 

More specific still as an indication of what he regarded as 
admirable in his master's diction and sought to perpetuate is 
a passage in his translated Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, in 
the course of which occurs a hymn to the Virgin. Chaucer 
had translated this, the well-known A.B.C., and Lydgate, 
after duly noting the fact, announces that 

. . . ffor memoyre off that poete, 

Wyth al his rethorykes swete, 

That was the ffyrste in any age 

That amendede our langage, 

Therefore, as I am bound of dette, ^ 

In thys book I wyl hym sette, 

And ympen this Oryson 

Affter his translation, 

My purpos to determyne, 

That yt shal enlumyne 

Thys lytyl book, Rud of makyng. 

With some clause of hys wrytyng.2 

Now the diction of this poem is distinctly " aureate " — not 
excessively, but still noticeably. Mercy able Quene, Queen of 
misericord e, so noble of appa/raile, whom God . . . from his 
ancille^ . . . made maistresse, vicaire . . . of al the world, 

1 L. c, II. 4677 et seq. 

2 L. c, lines 19773-84. 



48 AUREATE TERMS 

and . . . govemeresse * of hevene — all these words and many 
besides like them, make Chaucer's translation distinctly choice. 
Poems in honor of the Virgin were traditionally to be beauti- 
fied. How Chaucer observed the tradition, so far as word- 
choice is concerned, is clear. It is also clear in what way 
Lydgate supposed that Chaucer *' amendede " our language, 
and how a subject might be " enlumyned ". 

Of Lydgate, who became a great exemplar in his turn,^ it 
is unnecessary to speak further. The general re-enforcement 
of rhetorical precept through Chaucer's example need not be 
traced in detail. A few examples will suffice in illustration. 
One is the imitation of Boethius, probably based upon Chau- 
cer's translation, made by Thomas Usk in the poet's own life- 
time, the so-called Testament of Love. Another is the imita- 
tion of the Troilus, in the tragi-comic romance, Amorytts and 
Cleopas, by John Metham, in the mid-fifteenth century. Me- 
tham's use of proems to the incipient books, mythological ref- 
erences, digressions, dialogue, apostrophes, his Go, little hook, 
and long commendatory ending, are all as suggestive of their 
source as obviously borrowed incidents, such as the first meet- 
ing of the two principal characters in church. It has become 
a commonplace of literary comment to remark upon the imi- 
tation of Chaucer, his verse and his diction, by the " aureate " 
Scottish poets, especially the first James, Henryson, and Dun- 
bar. It is not such a commonplace to remark that their new 
words are part of the imitation. 

1 First use of these words in English. 

2 He was early grouped with Gower and iChaucer into a kind of poetic 
triumvirate, probably first by Bokenham. V. et George- Ashby's Primier 
poetes of this nacion, E. E. T. S. 76 E. S., p. 13; Hawes's A Commenda- 
tion of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, Pastime of Pleasure, etc. Gower 
was accounted {e. g. by the printer Berthelette) the clearest in diction; 
his English was probably nearer the colloquial average of his time. This 
is further proof that Chaucer's vocabulary was select. 



HOW THE TRADITION BECAME ENGLISH 



49 



Thus we may realize from still another point of view the 
nature of the influence exerted by Chaucer's work. All the 
old high-flown epithets of praise take renewed meaning. We 
can feel the cumulative effect of so much admiration. The 
stylist's arguments were well-nigh irrefutable with such a 
model at hand, and Skelton's protest that Chaucer's " termes 
are not darcke " is just such a phrase of reaction as shows to 
what a pass things finally came. Who dare call the clerks 
blind who saw only the " golden " side of the shield ? It was 
there. 



iV 
Special Aspects of the Tradition 



I. RHYME 



The general situation indicated by the foregoing account 
of the absorption of the rhetorical tradition into English was 
maintained and re-enforced by certain special causes. One of 
these was the necessities created by the requirements of rhyme. 
It is quite obvious to anyone reading in the literature of the 
fifteenth century that a large proportion of the rhymes are 
Romance words, and not only that, but many in addition are 
odd, choice, or " aureate ". It is necessary, therefore, to in- 
quire to what extent the exigencies of rhyme aided in develop- 
ing the diction we are considering. 

Since the influence of Chaucer was so great upon fifteenth- 
century literature, some observation of his practice is mani- 
festly in order. A study of the first ninety-eight lines of the 
Troilus reveals some interesting facts. These lines comprise 
the first fourteen stanzas of the poem, eight of which are ex- 
pository, six narrative. They contain in all seventy- two dif- 
ferent Romance words, and, exclusive of mere relational 
words, one hundred and forty-one native words, besides 
proper names. Of the Romance words thirty-seven are 
rhymes, thirty-two occur within the line, three are in both 
positions. The total of Romance rhymes is forty-two, two 
being repeated. Of the other rhymes, fifty are English, thirty- 
eight different words being used : the remaining six are proper 
names. The number of Romance words in the expository 
portion is forty-five, including twenty-nine rhymes — a prepon- 
50 



SPECIAL ASPECTS OF THE TRADITION 



51 



derate proportion. Of these words, one only is incontestably 
Chaucerian — expert (line 67). One other, benignity (rhyme, 
40), is perhaps here first used by him, but it occurs almost 
simultaneously in Wiclif and elsewhere. A few words {auc- 
torite, line 65, rhyme; generally, line 86; sorte, line 76) are 
used, apparently, in senses new or slightly changed from those 
hitherto developed. 

The general effect of the diction here and elsewhere in 
this indubitably stylistic poem is that of something elegant 
though not precious. All the words are used with such ease 
and propriety as to give the reader distinct pleasure. In addi- 
tion, there is a distinct sense of novelty and freshness con- 
veyed by most of them. Only one or two in this passage are 
new-minted, but, especially to conservative readers, many 
more would have seemed almost neologisms at that time. 
Endite (line 6, rhyme) and instrument (line 10, rhyme) 
would have been of this sort. It is of interest to note that 
Chaucer varies the word pray, used here several times, by the 
old native biddeth, indicating not so much that pray was trite, 
as that, having still an exact synonym, it was less common- 
place then than now. 

But what has this to do with rhyme? It will be noticed 
that the Romance words show a tendency to turn up fre- 
quently in the rhyme. Within this space, however, no very 
rare word occurs as a rhyme; one rhyme only may be new. 
The one word, expert, which, judged by its entire novelty 
and choiceness, might be regarded as a contribution to the 
aureate vocabulary of later times, occurs within the line. In 
the course of the entire first book there are about nine such 
new words : three of them occur first within the line, six under 
the rhyme. Mere newness, of course, did not constitute 
aureateness. Other words, like instrument, though not new, 
were not so common then and their choiceness was empha- 
sized by their position under the rhyme. 



^2 AUREATE TERMS 

The facts thus evidenced are fairly representative of Chau- 
cer's usage. His new words and his choice words are dis- 
tributed through the texture of his verse; they are not con- 
fined to the rhyme. The same fact is true of his immediate 
successors; their language is pretty homogeneous, not divis- 
f i'ble into aureate rhyme-words and simple line words. In 
Lydgate's Minor Poems, out of some sixty-five words which 
\ for their unusualness or rarity would undoubtedly be called 
\ aureate by the critics, fewer than thirty are exclusively rhym- 
ing words. ^ Likewise in John Metham's Amoryous romance, 
the aureate terms in the first two hundred lines, are distributed 
with reasonable uniformity. There are, within that space, but 
two arresting rhymes: divulgate (line 90), and fahriHed (line 
198). Noteworthy also for aureate terms within rather than 
at the end of the lines is the Book of Courtesye, called Caxton's, 
which is cited below. 

As the fifteenth century wore on, aureate rhymes increased in 
number — ^partly because authors developed less ease and flexi- 
bihty in their phrasing; they more frequently "stuck" upon 
a rhyme. Yet even Hawes, at first sight so rhyme-bound, was 
not incurably so. He never for one minute thought that the 

1 Among these, of words noted first in Lydgate, eight were non rhyme, 
viz. advertyse, appallyng, aureat, celical, circumspect, inveterat, patyse, 
protertrix: five, rhyme, vis. commutable, domynyoun, indurat, odihle, 
paucascioun. The proportion was much the same amongst other words 
occurring once in the poems under observation, while several occurred in 
both positions. Such observation is, of course, far from conclusive. It 
would be desirable to trace the words entirely through Lydgate (not many 
are a^ra^ ItyofiEva) and also through their original, if they are not primary 
with him. A greater knowledge of the exact chronology of the several 
works of Lydgate and other authors than we now possess would be 
necessary for drawing scientifically accurate conclusions. So far as any- 
thing approaching them could now be made, it was indicated that while 'a 
large number of the words were originally or predominantly rhyme words 
the total of such was less than forty per cent : while almost as many were 
originally prose or line words. 



SPECIAL ASPECTS OF THE TRADITION 



53 



" dulcet " or '' aureate " speech was a matter simply of rhyme. 
The very passage in which he defined aureate terms is finely 
homogeneous/ And almost as if for contrast, or to refute 
any wrong notion about aureateness, he followed that stanza 
by another in which the rhymes exclusively, and much of the 
rest, are as good homely '' Saxon " English as could any- 
where be found. 

An interesting investigation of this phase of the subject of 
aureate diction has been made by John M. Berdan,^ who has 
taken the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century treatise on 
poetics of Nicolaus Tybinus, and compared its rules for find- 
ing difficult rhymes with an annotated rhetorical Epitaffe ^ on 
the death of a Duke of Bedford, composed near the end of the 
fifteenth century by one Nicholas Smerte, the Duke's falconer. 
Professor Berdan points out, for instance, that two of a series 
of five rhymes {abuse and excuse) are used in this poem in 
senses slightly different from those recorded earlier in the 
New English Dictionary. Opposite the stanza containing 
these rhymes was set an orignal note, C(olor) Introduccio. 
This note Professor Berdan explains as referring to the 
method of finding rhyme described by Tibino (to use his 
Italian name) as aliene dictionis vntroducio. Two other notes 
are explained as proving a conscious application of two other 
rh)ane-rules described by Tibino. " Thus," concludes Pro- 
fessor Berdan, " was formed the aureate vocabulary." 

This conclusion can only properly refer to the general influ- 
ence of rhetoric touched on in the article, and not simply to 
the influence of the rhyming manuals which are more partic- 
ularly treated of. In the three illustrations chosen, I cannot 
believe that Smerte himself meant to indicate by his notes his 

'^Pastime of Pleasure, ii ; z^. sup. 

^Romanic Review, I. c. sup. 

^v. Dyce's Skelton Appendix, vol. ii (Boston, 1864). 



54 



AUREATE TERMS 



rhyme choices/ Though the examples quoted may be suscep- 
tible of different classification, the real principle involved is 
one which, consciously or unconsciously, is constantly being 
employed. Authors continually increased their vocabulary 
thus, and by no means only for the sake of rhyme. 

In short, though rhyme may be reckoned as a factor in fos- 
tering aureateness, it was not a primary cause. The very 
tone of Tibino's concluding exhortation proves that. " I urge 
you to remember faithfully these said methods for finding 
rimes : for they are themselves not only valuable for finding 
rimes, but also to the ornamentation of writing and by them 
authors induce subtility." ^ That is to say, love of the fine 
word itself is fundamental. 

^ The rhymes theniselves do not answer very well to the formulas for 
rhyme-finding supposedly indicated. Abuse and excuse were not borrowed 
words, (introductio) but words already long used in English, even if in 
slightly different senses. Encomhred (another example) was not a new- 
coined word, {Hctio) but likewise a word used in a sense slightly different 
from previously recorded usage. This term, Hctio, might with equal or 
greater propriety be appHed to the third example, penalty, did not the 
word occur in practically the same sense earlier. {Cf. the English 
Imifatio Christi, "Old Version", E. E. T. S., p. xxii). It is here ex- 
plained as transuniptio. 

Moreover in those times the term Color, which is attached to all these 
examples, referred rather to the feeling that suffused a passage, its effect, 
and not merely to the verbal tricks producing that effect — certainly not to 
rhyme rules. Elsewhere in his poem Smerte's notes of Color, which 
appear attached to passages rather than to words, indicate this under- 
standing of the term. The three now in question seem to me to indicate: 
in the case of Fictio, an imagined situation introducing the poem; in the 
case of Introductio, a paraphrase of a well-known example in Geoffrey 
de Vinsauf of lament for a hero — his Plantagenet, or " broom-cod " {Nova 
Poetria, 408 ff. Si fas est accuse Deum, etc.) ; and in the case of Trans- 
sumptio the transfer of an action, weeping, to hounds and falcons, who 
do not, literally speaking, possess it. Such forcing or extension of mean- 
ing as Smerte shows in the case of the words commented upon is a 
regular phenomenon of language, noted, of course, by the rhetoricians. 

'Berdan's translation, /. c. 



SPECIAL ASPECTS OF THE TRADITION 



55 



l/ 



Besides, it must, of course, be remembered that aureateness 
is not confined to verse. It is a distinct trait also of prose. 
Many of Chaucer's new words were introduced into his prose, 
and several aureate prose works, plainly intended to be aure- 
ate, have already been mentioned, such as the fifteenth-century 
translation of the Polychromcon and the English versions of 
the Imitatio Christi. 

2. RHYTHM 

It may be noted that, in prose, aureateness was fostered by 
desire for rhythm. In the manuals of letter-writing already 
referred to, it was often recommended that words be chosen 
out of consideration solely for their decorative and eupho- 
nious quality, " sola omatus et bonae sonoritatis causa ". ^ 
The subject of prose rhythm, which had been extensively dis- 
cussed in classical times, was revived, and certain rules laid 
down which unfortunate secretaries were supposed to follow 
in elegant Latin correspondence. For their aid, long resound- 
ing periphrases were developed, such as " vestrae probitatis 
agnoscat discretio '\ meaning listen.^ A study of the rhyth- 
mic periods of " Johannes Octo " ^ will show that they are 
constructed in consonance with such principles. An interest- 
ing bona Me instance of rhythmic inscription has been noted * 
on a chapel near Bath, England, dating from the fifteenth 
century : " Thys chapill floryschyd with f ormosyte spectabyll 
. . . Prior Cantlow had edyfyd." In these and similar in- 
stances the fine words are valued for their rich rh)rthmic sound ^ 
as well as for their other qualities. 

* Clark, Pontes Prosae Numerosae, p. 13, etc. 

'Clark, op. cit., pp. 13-15; Valois, pp. 70-80. Cf. the give credence, or 
audience, etc., in the poets of our period. 
' Wilson, /. c. 
*New English Dictionary, under flourished. 



^6 AUREATE TERMS 

Into this somewhat vexed question, the limits set for the 
present work do not permit me to go very deeply. A few 
examples may be quoted to represent the general contention. 
Thus from Lydgate's Serpent of Division^ (c. 1422) I take 
the following : " Late every man . . . prudently adverten the 
mutabilite and the sodein change of this f als world and late 
the wise gouvernours consideren in her hertes the contagious 
damages and the importable harmes of Division." The poly- 
syllables make a fine rolling period. Phrases in the same 
work, like unstancheable and greedy Couetise, irrecuperahle 
harmes, chief and premordial cause, are at once aureate and 
rhythmic. 

The fifteenth-century translation of Higden's Polychron- 
icon ^ goes further. Phrases like concorporate here lineamen- 
tally, and attendenge the intricacion inextricable of this labour 
presente, are rhythmic, not only in their word-order but in 
their word-choice. 

The translation of the Imitatio Christi, Caxton's prefaces 
and translations, and other prose works may be further exam- 
ined with this point in mind. Since, however, Professor 
Saintsbury in his History of English Prose Rhythm has gone 
very fully into this aspect of the subject, I need say no more 
about it here. 

3. ALLITERATION 

If rhyme be considered a help to aureate diction, so must 
alliteration. The extensive alliterative literature of the four- 
teenth and early fifteenth century observed the principle of 
alliteration to a higher degree than Old English had done, for 
whereas in ancient times the number of alliterations in the 
four-stress line varied normally from three to two, in the 

^v. H. N. MaoCracken's fine edition, Yale University Press, 191 1. 
^v. the ed. in the Rolls Series, vol. Ixi, pt. i, Prol. 



SPECIAL ASPECTS OF THE TRADITION 57 

fourteenth century three are generally present, occasionally 
four, and in addition the alliteration is often carried over 
through several lines. The necessity so created resulted in the 
use of some terms that might be called aureate. Professor 
Lounsbury was led to remark, rather hastily, that because of 
the occurrence of spelunke (Latin, spelunca, cave) and sev- 
eral other such words in Piers Plowman, Langland more de- 
served to be called an innovator than Chaucer.^ 

Study of the great alliterative romances ^ and of semi- 
alliterative works like The Pearl will reveal a certain precios- 
ity of diction which, though the words be not by any means 
all Latin or Romance, may yet be termed aureateness. It 
should be recalled that Stephen Hawes in defining aureate 
terms said that they are such as are " expedient " either " in 
Latyn or in English ". 

4. TRANSLATION 

Translation has also been suggested as a cause of aureate 
diction. This is the case, to some extent, in works like the 
fifteenth-century translation of Higden, and that of Thomas 
a Kempis's Imitatio Christi made at about the same time {i. e. 
the one called the " Old Version " by its editor in the Early 
English Text Society's publications. Caxton's translations, 
also, contain many fine words lifted bodily from his originals, 
and many other examples might be adduced. The use of 
words like concorporaie and longanimity, transferred from an 
original, afford strong evidence of the influence of translation 
in developing the aureate vocabulary. 

In spite, however, of the comparative frequency of this 
practice, translation cannot be said to be more than a second- 

1 Studies in Chaucer V (v. pt. ii, p. 452, Lx)ndon, 1892). 

2 Instance may be made of the Wars of Alexander, in which occur 
mascles = spots ; morsure = biting, pariet = w&\\. 



58 



AUREATE TERMS 



ary cause in producing aureate diction. It simply suggested, 
like rhyme, a means to an end. Even in the case of the works 
above cited, this is true, for the first contains in many of its 
most aureate passages words unknown to Higden. Compared 
to Trevisa's, the translation is poor, abridged in some places, 
inaccurate in others, and not always clear. But it is undoubt- 
edly aureate. The florid preface, for instance, though shorter 
than its original, contains some thirty-six noticeably aureate 
phrases. Of these, twenty-three are direct copies of the Latin, 
for example, commixtion, context, exemplars of acetones 
spectacle (Latin, spectahilium actionum exemplaria) , divine 
miseracion, etc. But the very respectable number of thirteen 
are the translator's own additions, viz.: enJmunsede and exal- 
tede (Latin, attollendi), mellifluous (three times — a favorite 
word with the translator), resplendence, a slawe souk and a 
slipper memory, ornate eloquence, inoppinable appetite, adver- 
tenge, obnubilous and dowdy, nowhle and laureate poete callede 
Homerus (Latin, Homerianos, adj.), haz^e indignacion, faith 
and credulity, contrarious. The list of directly borrowed 
words in the Imkatio translation is more impressive.^ A large 
number, however, of these words were already known to liter- 
ature (as abiecte, abusion, excusacion, etc.), and so are not 
solely inspired by the fact of translation. Finally, in Caxton, 
the borrowed word is frequently coupled with another, some- 
times native and simple, sometimes not, so that it would ap- 
pear as if he took words over not simply for their own sake, 
but to provide those rich doublets which mark his own and 
other English attempts at a lofty style. 

It was the general custom of the age, when translating, not 
to take over the word itself. This is readily apparent in 
translation before 'Chaucer's time. It is generally true of 
Chaucer's own work. That part of the Romaunt of the Rose 

1 See Ingram's edition, E. E. T. S., 63 E. S., pp. xxi-xxii. 



1 



SPECIAL ASPECTS OF THE TRADITION c^g 

translation which is usually conceded to be his, shows very 
few transfers ; the langtiage is comparatively simple, as in the 
original. His Boethius translation contains terms both rare 
and new^ in English, of aureate effect, derived from the orig- 
inal, but the whole translation impresses one as having been 
made in a simple, idiomatic diction, well-chosen, suggesting, 
as is most proper, rather speech than writing. As has already 
been remarked, the Troilus contains but few of Boccaccio's 
words, though among those few are one or two very striking 
terms. In the A. B. C, praised by Lydgate for its aureateness, 
comparison of the first two stanzas with the original shows 
only three duplicated terms : glorious, virgin, adversary; per- 
haps also socour: by no means unusual, so that it would ap- 
pear that Chaucer's fine words in that piece are largely of his 
own seeking, especially since he rather paraphrased the poem 
than translated it. What most impresses me, however, is the 
fact that even when words are transferred literally from an 
original, it is by no means always to the same position. Had 
aureate terms been always, or even largely, sought deliber- 
ately from translation, they would have been transferred im- 
mediately, as in so many cases in the fifteenth-century Higden. 
It may be said that Chaucer is not a good example, since he 
was professedly anxious to render the sense primarily, and 
not to " adorn " his versions. Without arguing this question 
again, I will simply point to the usage of others, not to Tre- 
visa, whose letter about translation is most interesting reading, 
or to translators like him, but to those professedly concerned 
about style as well as about sense, even though deprecatory of 
their own efforts. For example, Hoccleve's translations, where 
I have been able to check them up more completely, as in the 
case of his Letter to Cupid and in his rendering of Gesta Ro- 
manorum stories, do not show many direct transfers. Chris- 
tine de Pisan's Epistre au Dieu d' Amours, the model for the 
former, may be less aureate than some of her other works ; at 



6o AUREATE TERMS 

any rate, Hoccleve is not, verbally, much indebted to it for the 
dignified language his letter contains/ The language of both 
the Latin and the English Gesta is fairly simple and concise; 
these qualities are not closely imitated by Hoccleve in his ren- 
dering of the story of Jereslaus's wife, or that of Jonothas. 
In them, the stanza form chosen by him for his translation 
naturally tempted him to verbosity, and his manner of yield- 
ing reminds one of Malmesbury's saying that to an English- 
man style means pomp. 

It might be supposed that so great a translator as Lydgate 
would be the best man to examine on this score, especially in 
view of his fondness for novel words, but at present, unfor- 
tunately, many of his most important sources, while known, 
do not exist in easily accessible editions. His known habit of 
padding, and the fairly uniform character of his language, 
make it seem probable, a priori, that as with others translation 
simply gave him a store of words to use as he saw fit. The 
two instances given by Dr. Reismueller as presumptive evi- 
dence that translation furnished him directly with a large pro- 
portion of his new words are far from conclusive in a stylistic 
relation. They are dondine, an instrument of torture, and 
humhard, a piece of ordnance, both occurring. Dr. Reismueller 
has ascertained, in the passage of his original which Lydgate 
was translating at that point. But both are technical words, 
used in their exact sense, and therefore hardly subject to re- 
mark stylistically. They were most likely current in English ; 
they seem at any rate adapted to English speech (French, 
dondaine, bombarde) . Furthermore, when in the Pilgrimage 
of the Life of Man he wrote 

which that clerkys in sentence 

Calle wantyng, or carence, 

Of original ryghtwysnesse. . . . 

1 See the comparison, not very accurately made, in E. E T. S., 6i E. S., 
pp. 243-2148. The full text of the Epistre is in Soc. des An. Textes Fran., 
vol. ii, pp. 1-27 of its author's works. 



SPECIAL ASPECTS OF THE TRADITION 6l 

the term carence may most likely be explained as induced by 
rhyme and only partly as a translation, yet I cannot help feel- 
ins: that it was also a satisfaction to the author to introduce a 
word of this kind, with its scholarly and exact associations, 
into his verse, more so than dondine or bombard. There is 
this essential difference : that there were no other words for 
the material objects, but carence was an elegant equivalent 
for plain English wantyng. Incidentally, it is interesting to 
note how the fifteenth century in thus explaining an English 
by a Latin term reversed the practice of the fourteenth. 
Aureate diction had made considerable progress. 

With regard to translation, my conclusion is, that the prac- 
tice of it, as the rhetoricians themselves pointed out, simply 
increased the vocabulary in a general way. Translation of a 
highly " colored " piece of literature might involve an attempt 
to reproduce its beauties, but not (witness always the fifteenth- 
century Higden) by simple bodily transfer of its words. Their 
reading and translation together gave translators rich stores 
of words upon which they could readily draw when the stylistic 
impulse seized them. Therefore I reckon translation as a 
distinct help to the aureate style, or as sometimes providing 
an impulse towards it, but as neither a sole nor even a prin- 
cipal cause. 

5. PATRONAGE 

A fifth cause of aureate diction remains to be discussed. It 
is patronage. This term is one somewhat loosely used. It is 
oftenest limited to that habit of subsidizing authors which is 
most familiarly illustrated by reference to early eighteenth- 
century practice. It may also, however, mean simply an en- 
couraging interest in letters on the part of those superior in 
station to an author, with or without donatives of money or 
honors. Probably even in the palmiest days of patronage no 
man ever received social preferment, wealth, or increased posi- 



(^2 AUREATE TERMS 

tion simply because he could write. If that were all he could 
do, and his services were wanted, he was hired. His literature, 
however, if it proved interesting or useful, might further 
recommend him, if it had not introduced him, to the attention 
of the great, and so indirectly contribute to his worldly ad- 
vancement. The latter may have been the case with Chaucer ; 
the former is more common. 

Hitherto, this concomitant of fifteenth-century literature 
has been by no means unnoticed, though somewhat imperfectly 
estimated. An interest in literature on the part of the Plan- 
tagenet and especially of the Lancastrian kings has often 
been remarked; Lydgate's biographers and editors, especially 
Schick, in his edition of the Temple of Glas, have listed his 
patrons and commissions; but there have been few thorough 
studies of the subject for this period such as that made by 
Professor Samuel Moore for Norfolk and Suffolk, c. 1450.^ 
In Professor Moore's opinion, this patronage came to little in 
the end, because it produced no new literary types. He brings 
forward again, however, the question of the outburst of allit- 
erative literature in the West Midlands a century earlier, sug- 
gesting that it may have been due to similar encouraging 
conditions. There is much in the refined and courtly character 
of that literature to support the suggestion. 

These conditions of whole or semi-patronage, I believe, ex- 
ercised a marked influence on the diction of the fifteenth- 
century litterateurs. Moore's articles prove that patronage 
affected not only Lydgate, but also Burgh, both of whom were 
aureate, and Bokenham, who knew what style was, though he 
had hardly any himself. Hulbert, who denies patronage to 
Chaucer, allows it to Hoccleve, on the testimony of their 
verses.^ Not to cite other examples, like those of John 

^ See Pub. Mod. Lang. Assoc, 1912-13. 
"^ P. 64, op. cit. inf. 



SPECIAL ASPECTS OF THE TRADITION 63 

Metham or William Atkynson in England, we might note that 
the aureate Scottish poets, in the opinion of Gregory Smith, ^ 
were influenced in their work by James IV's patronage of art 
and letters. In France, during the century, Christine de Pisan, 
Alain Chartier, and the Grandes Rhetoriqueurs, whose diction 
is in effect the same as that which we are considering, were all 
beneficiaries of patronage. The fact, then, that a book was 
to pass, presumably, under the eye of people educated as well 
as the writer, or better than he, in the rhetorical tradition, 
was quite as much a reason for the frequent apologies by 
authors for the imperfections of their works as was natural 
or artificial modesty, or a convention dating from classic times. 
This custom alone is clear, though negative, evidence of an 
existing critical taste. More interesting are some of the direct 
references to a cultivated public and its critical attitude. 

Valuable testimony to the formal character of the age, are 
its numerous treatises on courtesy and etiquette. All of these 
enjoined care in speech and delivery as part of the reverent 
bearing due one's superior. At times, as in Lydgate's Stans 
Puer ad Mensam, they are themselves couched in choice lan- 
guage. But the most interesting of them is probably Caxton's, 
which, in addition to the usual precepts, elegantly expressed, 
contains a long digression, of one hundred and nineteen lines 
(stanzas 45-61) in praise of literature and especially of 
Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate, " founders of our 
language ". These stanzas are eloquently phrased. Their in- 
tent is tO' urge reading, that one's mind may be well-stored 
with matter and the means of adequately expressing it. 

The class of noble and clerkly readers by and for whom the 
tradition of letters was chiefly maintained, were accustomed 
to be approached and addressed with formal dignity. This is 

^The Transition Period (i. e., the fifteenth century), in the Periods of 
European Literature Series. See p. 49. 



64 



AUREATE TERMS 



especially plain in the epistolary tradition/ Lively examples 
of this are to be found in Chaucer. The young squire was 
familiar with the manners of court. He knew how a message 
to a king should sound, though he might not have been able 
to compose one himself, and he knew how it should be read 
aloud. ^ The negative example in Troilus is even more inter- 
esting. Towards the end of the second book, Pandarus gives 
the lovelorn youth good advice with regard to the letter he is 
to send to Criseyde.^ The passage is a fine example of Chau- 
cer's ideas of literary fitness. This particular letter is not to be 
digneliche endited. So reads the accepted version of line 1024. 
But collation of the Troilus Mss. reveals five other readings : 
dyneliche ne mystiliche (questioned by Pollard as a corrup- 
tion of deynousliche) ; clerkissly, clergaly, clerkly (supposed 
by Professor Root, probably in view of the scrivenly ne craftily 
in line 1026, to be copyists' errors) ; and papally. The last 
variant is unaccounted for, but one thinks instinctively of the 
papal secretaries chosen from the " graduates " of the famous 
Orleans school, and the whole tradition of the Cancellaria. 
In such a process of constant revision of the text as that so 
vividly described by Professor Root, it is not impossible that 
one or two of these variants may represent tentative choices 
by Chaucer himself.* At any rate they present, taken to- 
gether, almost a little epitome of the epistolary tradition, and 
the quarters in which one might expect to find it flourishing. 
However suitable for argument or royal or papal communica- 
tions, such a style was too ornate to seem sincere in a genuine 

^See the discussion of this topic by M. B. Hansche, The Formative 
Period of English Familiar Letter-writers, &c., Phila., 1902. 

^ Tales, F 88-109. 'Note the joke about the "heigh" style! 

' Troilus, II., lines 1023-50 et seq. The passage well illustrates what a 
fresh mind Chaucer brought to bear on rhetoric. 

* See The Textual Tradition of Chaucer's Troilus, Chaucer Society, vol. 
99, series i. 



SPECIAL ASPECTS OF THE TRADITION 65 

love-letter. Per contra, it might be permissible in the former. 
And it is noteworthy that in literary imitations of these, and 
in the formal complaints, bills, and epistles between allegor- 
ical or mythological personages, of which the century was so 
prolific, aureate terms and turns of phrase are numerous.^ 

This, however, is simply a general condition, of which our 
subject demands more specific instances. These are not want- 
ing. From the beginning of Old English literature in the 
seventh century, dedication of books to people of rank are 
accompanied by references to style and marked by efforts at it. 
The Latin letters of the eleventh and following centuries which 
have already been referred to, and of which large collections 
exist, '* were not merely private letters, but elaborate and 
courtly compositions ",^ their style generally rising in propor- 
tion to the dignity of the writer or of the person addressed. 

With the accession of the Plantagenets, patronage of letters 
and the obligations of style thereby imposed were perhaps 
even more distinctly recognized than before. It has been 
stated ^ that these kings fostered certain forms of literature, 
such as history and romance (almost always stylistic), for 
political purposes, just as it is known that they encouraged 
other forms, and of course these also, for pleasure only. 
Henry II was exhorted like the patrons of old, like Maecenas.* 
His son Richard was Geoffrey de Vinsauf 's hero. Richard II, 
the unheroic namesake of that ill-starred champion, has been 
accounted a patron of English letters. His patronage may 

*As an example of the former, see the letter from Lucius to Arthur 
in the alliterative Morte Arthur, E. E. T. S., 8 O. S., lines 86 ff.; of the 
latter, Chaucer's Compleynte unto Pite. Note the epithet serenous, line 
90 (not a rhyme), so unusual a word that scribes misread it. 

''Clark, Pontes Prosae Numerosae, p. 13. 

'C/. Cambridge Hist. Eng. Literature, vol. i, chap, ix; Greene, Short 
History, chap, iii, sec. i; etc. 

*By Osbert of Clara; v. Caxton Society, vol. v, pp. 205-11. 



u 



66 AUREATE TERMS 

have been overrated, but his interest in Hterature seems a fact. 
The gift of books detailed by Froissart is the best proof of 
this, even if their binding only appealed to the king as much 
as it did to their author/ All of Exiward Ill's children were 
well educated. John of Gaunt has been called Chaucer's 
patron. The extent to which his " patronage ", whatever it 
was, was a cause of Chaucer's receiving pensions and offices 
may have been overestimated,^ but this fact does not disprove 
an interest in letters.^ His descendants, the Lancastrian kings, 
were noted for literary commissions. Their court imitated 
them. Henry VI from the beginning was in the hands of the 
clerks for them to work their will upon. His, uncle and regent, 
Humphrey of Gloucester, was famous for his interest in books 
and libraries. The mother of Henry VII not only gave com- 
missions, but herself essayed authorship,* and was the object 
of dedications.^ 
/ Authors working under these conditions sought to make 
their diction choice, learned, or aureate. A striking example 
is Lydgate's Legend of St. Margaret, for instance, written by 
special request of Lady March. Subject or patron, or both 
together, shed, in this instance, some " aureate lycoure " into 

1 Chronicles of England, France and Spain, chap, xxii (Dunster's text^ 
Everyman's Library, pp. 522 and 525). "I had taken care to form a 
collection of ... poetry ... finely ornamented ... He (the king) opened it 
and looked into it with much pleasure. He ought to have been pleased, 
for it was handsomely written and illuminated, and bound in crimson 
velvet, &c. . . He dipped into several places, reading parts aloud." Be- 
sides this, there are the lines, later suppressed, in the prologue of the 
Confessio Amantis, and an entry on the Issues Roll under 1380 for pur- 
chase of books. 

^See J. R. Hulbert, Chaucer's Official Life (Univ. of Chicago thesis), 
Banta Pub. Co., 191 2, p. 64. 

' See review of Hulbert, op. cit., by Moore, Pub. Mod. Lang. Assoc, 28 
(1913), pp. 189-193. 

* Imitatio Christi, op. cit. Her work is mildly aureate. 

'Caxton, Blanchardyn and Eglantyne, E. E. T. S., 58 K S. 



SPECIAL ASPECTS OF THE TRADITION 67 

his pen/ In like manner, his poem to St. Denis, said to have 
been written at the request of the French king, is gilded, like 
the Legend, with special heaviness, particularly at the begin- 
ning and end.^ Aureate touches, indeed, are lacking in few 
pieces written by the Monk of Bury, but these are most notice- 
able in poems of his actually inscribed to people of dignity 
and condition, or in a sense dedicated to their subject, to the 
aristocracy of Heaven, as it were.^ John Metham's aureate 
romance, Amoryous and Cleopas, was composed in elevated 
style because of dedication to Sir Miles Stapleton and his 
Lady. Other instances might be cited, but in Caxton they 
may be found all summed up in the preface to the Aeneydos, 
where he distinctly said that he would admit some, not the 
most, clerkly and learned terms into the translation because 
the book was intended for gentlemen. In so doing, he simply 
followed an immemorial tradition. 

^ Minor Poems, E. E. T. S., 107 E. S., pp. 173 ff. 
^Ihid., pp. 127 ff. 

' See the Miserkordias, and the St. Anne: Minor Poems, pp. 71 ff. and 
130 ff. ; also the Te Deum, ibid., pp. 21-24. 



In Conclusion 

All this evidence goes to show that the rhetorical traditions 
planted amongst the English with the establishment of the 
first Christian schools encouraged a select or precious Latinity 
both by precept and example. Strong in great scholars or 
clerks like Aldhelm, Bede, Malmesbury, John of Salisbury, 
and de Vinsauf, reflected in the letters, treatises, and histories 
of men as different as Alcuin, ^thelwerd, de Losinga, Mon- 
mouth, Roger Bacon and Grosseteste (to name only some of 
the more prominent — all men of affairs or varied interests), 
it was known, however vaguely, to all who wrote or read. 
This tradition expressed itself not only in figures or " colors '* 
(verbal or intellectual), which have not been specifically con- 
sidered here, but in a general effort to be refined, elegant or 
stately in word-choice itself. 

Though associated at first only with Latin literature, this 
tradition necessarily exercised an influence on the minds of 
Englishmen which presently shows in vernacular composition. 
With the renewed cultivation of literature in the native tongue 
during the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, in so far 
as it was intended for plain people's reading, English was kept 
studiously " pure '' in diction, picturesque, but simple and un- 
elaborate. This point is clearly proved by reference to the 
work of Layamon or Orm, to the popular religious writing of 
the times, and especially to that of Robert Mannyng and Dan 
Mitchel. But when the work was intended for educated or 
courtly readers, rhetoric enjoined that it be " after a higher 
68 



IN CONCLUSION 69 

rate ". The stylistic pretence is present, and choice words, 
such as were more familiar to trained ears, crop out. This is 
visible in as early a work as the Ancren Riwle, but as the 
number of educated readers of English increased during the 
fourteenth century so did the tendency, until, upon coming to 
Chaucer, we find that all his first admirers said about the 
gaiety and freshness of his diction is, in view of his innova- 
tions, literally true. Chaucer used the language that was 
easiest and most natural to him and most suitable to his pur- 
poses. No theory that one particular sort of word was better 
than any other hampered him, but his experience and sense of 
fitness introduced an extraordinary number of new and choice 
words into English literature, large numbers of them being 
Romance or Romance-Latin in immediate origin. This ex- 
ample, strengthening the ideals they were continually taught, 
encouraged his imitators to make similar innovations. Lyd- 
gate was foremost in taking this course, and his example be- 
came fully as potent as Chaucer's. In the course of the fif- 
teenth century such innovation became increasingly deliberate. 
Towards the close of the century it culminated not, however, 
in a sudden peak, but in a sort of tableland gradually ap- 
proached. It terminated in the face of Humanism, or we 
may say assumed a new form. The seventeenth century wit- 
nessed its resurgence in such manuals as Henry Cokeram's, 
which would have been as welcome and well-thumbed a book 
in most fifteenth-century writing-rooms as a Roget's Thesaurus 
is said to be in newspaper offices today. 

Fully to understand the phenomenon, we should remember 
that English words also were regarded as potentially choice. 
The whole matter cannot be entirely presented until the sty- 
listic use of English and dialectal words has also been inves- 
tigated, questions of personal taste examined, and evidence 
presumptive as well as evidence direct considered. These, 
however, have for the moment been regarded as secondary 



70 



AUREATE TERMS 



issues and attention has been here called chiefly to direct 
evidence of word-choice consciously made under the influence 
of rhetorical precept. 

The rhetorical tradition thus touched upon was very broad. 
Certain of its aspects, such as its application to rhyme, rhythm, 
alliteration, translation, and what is somewhat loosely termed 
patronage, have been more particularly dwelt upon. All of 
these habits were powerful in developing the diction some- 
times regarded as peculiar to the fifteenth century. 

Its peculiarity is more apparent than real, and due almost 
wholly to a break in tradition. Save by a few scholars, no 
author of the fifteenth-century aureate school has been read 
since the latter part of the sixteenth century. Rightly or 
wrongly, popular knowledge and reading, save of a few great 
outlying figures like Chaucer, does not usually go back further 
than to Shakespeare's contemporaries. The literary tradition 
formed anew in the sixteenth century has changed in some 
respects, but it has been continuous. That of the fifteenth 
century, so far as it still exists, does so less by direct survival 
than by perpetuation of part of it in the work of later men 
who are still read. Were the Shakespearean and Miltonic 
vocabularies to become as unfamiliar as the Lydgatian ^ and 
Skeltonic, they would present more oddities than, as a matter 
of fact, even to many cultivated readers, they do. 

In consequence of such a break in tradition many words of 
the aureate vocabulary that had not a wide currency became 
obsolete entirely. Nor was this true of whole words only. 
Often the root of a word has survived, but with a different 
ending, as abuse instead of abusion, or habitation in prefer- 
ence to habitacle. Other words, like abject, are now found 
only in specialized senses. Even the orthography of the fif- 

1 Though Lydgate's vocabulary has been called " modern ", in contra- 
distinction to Chaucer's, v. Schick, Temple of Glas, E. E, T. S., Introd. 



IN CONCLUSION 71 

teenth century, its doublings, its use of y for i, and c for the^ 
*' soft " sound of f (in -cion, now -twn), plays a part in alien- 
izing its words from modern consciousness. 

From a broader point of view, one may, after reading in the 
literature of the period, disregard circumstances like these as 
of little moment. In another respect, however, the tradition 
has been more effectually broken. Obsolete meanings may be 
recovered, but feeling, association, are more elusive. The fact 
is, our ideas of fitness have been modified. In the fifteenth 
century, a sense of fitness led authors to cultivate the pom- 
pous and the grandiose. Limitation of subject to abstract 
themes, or those remote from daily life, and to a rather select 
Audience, inclined them that way all the more. In modern 
times, as in Shakespeare's and in Chaucer's, we are more sen- 
sitive to common human interests. More and more we neglect 
formal manners, and with them formal diction. Hence, to 
an impartial observer it would appear that though they pro- 
fessed to uphold the same principle, the two literary modes, 
ours and theirs, are mutually strange to each other. 

In that principle of fitness is to be found the real explana- 
tion of aureate diction. Fostered for centuries in the schools, 
it took on more and more the color of its environment. Recip- 
rocally it influenced the succeeding generations of clerks who 
used it until they, imbued with it, transmitted their taste to 
those princes, gentlemen and others whose education they had 
in charge. It is a striking instance of inbreeding's producing 
a special type of mentality and expression. So long as the edu- 
cational system remained the same, the aureate tradition was 
bound to retain its particular tinge. 

Such was the why of aureateness. It was part of the 
slowly-developed and carefully-guarded sense of propriety 
cherished by the clerkly and educated classes. It was, so to 
speak, part of the prerogative belonging in those days to rank. 
Like many other prerogatives, grown old and stiff, it disap- 



72 AUREATE TERMS 

peared before the arrogant onslaught of fresh popular ideas. 
It had its parallels, of course, in later times, but these were 
never quite the same. It is more easily to be connected with 
what went before than with what came after. 

Its ultimate cause, then, is psychological. Men had it be- 
cause they wanted it. The aureate school was expressive as 
well as impressive. It could not so insist on fitness and con- 
fuse that notion with oddity, foreign derivation, rhyme, or 
whatever. A word was chosen ; it was written ; it was accept- 
able to those who considered themselves trained judges. That 
was aureate diction. It aimed at setting forth its matter 
worthily, according to a great tradition. If indeed it failed 
and ceased, it was not because its ideal was bad, but because 
men got out of touch and out of sympathy with the fifteenth 
century. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 
I. -General References 

Cambridge History of English Literature, New York, 1907 ff. 

Courthope, W. J. History of English Poetry, London, iSpS-ipia 

Ebert, Adolf. Allgemeine Gesckichte der Literatur des Mittelalters im 

Abendlande, Leipzig, 1880. 
Freeman, E. A. History of the Norman Conquest of England, Oxford, 1870. 
Krapp, G. P. Rise of English Literary Prose, New York, 1915. 
Marsh, G. P. Lectures on the English Language, New York, 1867 (4th ed.) • 
Morley, Henry. English Writers, London, 1891-3. 
Norden, E. A. Die Antike Kunstprosa vom VL Jahrhundert v. Chr. his 

in die Zeit der Renaissance, Leipzig, 1898. 
Paul, H. Grundriss der Germanischen Philologie, Strassburg, 1901 ; es- 
pecially Kluge's article on English, pp. 926-1 151. 
Petit de Julleville, L. Histoire de la langue et de la litterature francaise 

des origines a 1900, Paris, 1896- 1900. 
Rashdall, H. The Universities of Europe during the Middle Ages, 

Oxford, 1895. 
Saintsbury, G. A. A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe, 

New York, 1908. 
Saintsbury, G. A. A History of English Prose Rhythm, London, 1912. 
Saintsbury, G. A. A History of English Prosody, London, 1908. 
Ten Brink, B. E. iK. Geschichte der Englischen Literatur, Strassburg, 

1899; ed. A. Brandl. 
Teuffel, W. S. Geschichte der Romischen Literatur, Leipzig, 1910-13. 
Traill, H. D. Social England, New York, 1894-97. 

11. Texts 

a. — collections used 

Note. — The following collections have been completely examined. The 
parts more particularly used are listed below, with abbreviations as indicated. 

B. C. Bannantyne Club, Edinburgh 1825-1848. 

C. S. Chaucer Society, Series i and 2, London, 1867. 

Ca. So. Caxton Society, London, etc., vols. 1-16, 1844- 1854. 
E. E. T. S. Early English Text Society, Original Series, 1864 to date; 
Extra Series, 1867 to date. London. 

73 



74 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



E. G. An English Garner, London, 1903 (12 vols.)- 

H. Halm, C, Rhetores Latini Minor es, Leipzig, 1863. 

K. Keil, H., Grammatici Latini, Leipzig, 1857, 7 vols. 

L. Leyser, P., Historia Poetarum et Poematum Medii Aevi, Halle, 1721. 

M. Migne, A., Patrologiae Cursus Computus, Paris, 1841 on. 

Ma. Mari, G., / Trattati Medievali di Ritmica Latina, Milan, 1899. 
(e Memorie del (R. Instituto Lombardo, etc., and separately). 

P. S. Percy Society. 

Rolls. Rerum Brittanicarmn Medii Aevi Scriptores: Chronicles and Me- 
morials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages, London, 
1857 on. 

S. A. T. F. Societe des Anciennes Textes Francaises, Paris, 1875 on. 

S. T. S. Scottish Text Society, Edinburgh and London. 

B. — WORKS AND AUTHORS 

Note. — The following list is bound ultimately to develop into a catalogue 
of medieval literature. At present it includes only those authors whose 
works were fully reviewed in expectation of more direct or obvious 
stylistic references. Doubtless some have been forgotten. 
Alanus de Insulis, 

Anticlaudianus, L; Rolls, 59, pt. 2, ed. Thomas Wright, 1872. 
De Planctu Naturae, Rolls, 59, pt. 2. Translated by D. M. Douglas, 
Yale Studies in English, vol. z^, igc^. 
Alcuin, 

Disputatio de Rhetorica, H, pp. 525-550; general account, A. F. West, 
Alcuin and the Rise of the Christian Schools, Scribners, 1892; 
Letters analyzed, R. B*. Page, Columbia University, 1909. 
Aldhelm. 

Works, M. 89; life, etc., by William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontiicum, 
Rolls, 52, Book V. 
Alexander and Dindimus, E. E. T. S., 31 E. S., ed. Skeat, 1878. 
Ashby, George, 

Poems, E. E. T. S., 76 E. S., ed. Mary Bateson, 1899. 
St. Augustine, 

De Doctrina Christiana, M. 3. 
Bacon, Roger, 

Opus Tertium, etc.. Rolls, 15, ed. J. C. Brewer, 1859. 
Bede, 

Complete Works, 12 vols., ed. J. A. Giles, Whitaker and Co., London, 
1843. Vol. 6 contains the metrical treatise and that on figures, De 
Schematihus et Tropis. The latter also is in H., pp. 607-618. 
Burgh, B., 

Poem to Lydgate, Secrees, etc., in E. E. T. S., 66 E. S. v. sub 
Lydgate inf. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



7S 



Bnmetto Latini, 

// Tesoretto, Turin, 1750. 

// Tesoro, Bologna, 1878, ed. P. Chabaille. 
Capella, Martianus M. F., 

De Nuptiis Phdlologiae et Mercurii, ed. Kopp, Frankfort-on-Main, 
1836; 

De Arte Rhetorica, H., pp. 451-492. 
Cas&iodorus Senator, 

Works, Geneva, 1656; 

De Rhetorica, H., pp. 495-504; 

Letters (translated), Thomas Hodgkin, London, 1886. 
Caxton, William, 

Aeneydos, E. E. T. S., 57 E. S., ed. Culley and Furnivall, 1890; 

Blunchardyn and Eglantyne, E. E. T. S., 58 E. S., ed. L. Kellner, 1890; 

Book of Curtesye, E. E. T. ,S., 3 E. S., ed. F. J. Furnivall, 1868; 

Charles the Crete (Sir Ferumbras), E. E. T. S., 36 E. S., ed. S. J. H. 
Herrtage, 1880; 

Curial of Alain Chartier, E. E. T. S., 54 E. S., Furnivall, 1888; 

Godefroy of Boloyne, E. E. T. S., 64 E. S., ed. M. N. Colvin, 1893; 

Preface and Epilogues, Pollard, E. G., I., pp. 213-242. 
Chaucer, 

Quoted from Globe Edition, ed.. Pollard, 1907, and compared with 
C. S. reprints of Mss. 
Christine de Pisan, 

S. A. T. F., 1886, 3 vols., ed., M. Roy. 
Cicero, 

De Inventione, Mueller — Friederich, Leipzig, 1890; 

De Oratore, ibid', 

Orator, ibid. 
Cleneness, etc., 

E. E. T. S., I O. S., ed.. Richard Morris, 1864. 
Coxe, L., 

The Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke, Text, with comment, ed. by F. L 
Carpenter, University of Chicago Studies, No. 5, 1899. 
Cursor Mundi, 

E. E. T. S., 57 O. S., ed. R. Morris, 1874-1893. 
Dante, 

De Vulgari Eloquio, translated by A. G. F. Howell, Cambridge, 1890. 
Deschamps, Eustache, 

S. A. T. F., 1878, II vols., ed., Marquis de Saint-Hilaire. 
Dominic {Prior), 

Life of Ecgwin, etc.. Rolls 29 (Evesham Chronicle), ed., W. D. 
Macray, 1863. 



76 B9BLI0GRAPHY 

Donatus, 

Ars Grammatica, K., vol. IV. 
Douglas, (Bishop) Gavain, 

Aeneid, B. C., vol. 64, 1829; 

Palice of Honour, B. C, vol. 17, ed., J. G. Kinncar, 1827. 
Dunbar, Wm., 

Poems, S. T. S., ed., John Small, 1903. 
Eadmer, 

Historia, Rolls 81, ed. Martin Rule, 1884. 
Early English Lyrics, 

Chambers and Sidgwick, London, 191 1. 
Eberhard, 

Labyrinthus, L., pp. 795 ff. ; book IV., (on rhyming verse), Ma., 
pp. 453-562. 
Eddius, 

Life of St. Wilfrid, Ca. So., 16, pp. 198-277, ed., Giles, 1854. 
Elmer, Prior of Canterbury. 

Letters, Ca. So., 5, ed., R. Anstruther, 1846, pp. 213-233. 
Euphues, 

Ed., M. W. CroU and H. Clemons, New York, 1916. 
Fortunatianus, C. Cheirius, 

Artes Rhetoricae Libri III., H., pp. 81-134. 
Genesis and Exodus, 

E. E. T. S., 7 O. S., ed., R. Morris, 1865. 
Geoffrey de Vinsauf, 

Nova Poetria, L., pp. 855 ff. 
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 

Historiae Regum Britanniae (Latin text), ed., J. A. Giles, Ca. So., 
I, 1844. Transl., Everyman's Library. 
Gesta Romanorum, 

(English), ed. Sir F. Madden, London, 1838; also E. E. T. S., 33 E. S., 
ed., S. J. H. Herrtage, 1879. 

(Latin), H. Oesterley, Berlin, 1871. 
Giraldus Cambrensis, 

Works, Rolls, 21 (8 pts.), ed., J. S. Brewer, 1861. 
Gower, John, 

Confessio Amantis, E. E. T. S., 81 E. S., ed., G. C. Macaulay, 1900. 
Grossteste, Robert, 

Letters, Rolls 25, (ed., Henry R. Luard, 1861). 

Cliasteau d'Amour, Ca. So., 15, ed., M. Cooke, 1852. 
Hampole, Richard Rolle of, and other mystics, 

in Horstmann's two volumes Yorkshire Writers, London, 1895-6 
(Library of Early English Writers). 

The Pricke of Conscience not included in this. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



77 



Hawes, Stephen, 

Pastime of Pleasure, P. S., i8, ed., Thomas Wright, 1845. 
Henryson, Robert, 

Poems, S. T. S., vol. 55 (3 vols.), ed., G. G. Smith, 1906. 
Herbert de Losinga, 

Letters, Ca. So., 5, pp. 1-107. 
Higden, R., 

Polychronicon, Rolls, 41 (9 pts.), ed., C Babington, 1865. Contains 
the original Latin, Trevisa's translation, and that of the anonymous 
fifteenth-century clerk. 
Hoccleve, T., 

Minor Poems, E. E. T. S., 61 E. S., ed., F. J. Furnivall, 1892. 

Regement of Princes, E. E. T. S., 72 E. S., ed., F. J. Furnivall, 1897. 
Imitatio Christi, 

Two fifteenth-century translations, E. E. T. S., 63 E. S., ed., J. K. 
Ingram, 1893. 
Ingulph's Chronicle, etc., 

Bohn, translation by H. T. Riley, 1854. 
Isidore of Seville, 

His treatise on Rhetoric is in H., pp. 507-523. 

See under Brehaut, inf. 
Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, 

Rolls, 38, ed., Wm. Stubbs, 1864. 
James I. of Scotland, 

Kingis Quhair, S. T. S., vol. i, ed., W. W. Skeat, 191 1. 
John de Garlandia, 

Treatise on verse. Ma., pp. 407-452. 
John of Salisbury, 

Policraticus, ed., C. C. T. Webb, 2 vols., Oxford, 1909. 

Opera Omnia, ed., J. A. Giles, Oxford, 1848. (vol. 5 contains the 
Metalogicus) . 
Langland, William, 

Piers Plowman, E. E. T. S., 28 O. S., ed., Skeat, 1878. 
Layamon, 

Brut, ed., Sir F. Madden, London, 1847, 3 vols. 
Legendary, Early South-English, 

E. E. T. S., 87 O. S., ed., Horstmann, 1887. 
Lives of Anglo Saxons, 

Ca. So., 16, Ed., J. S. Giles, 1854. Contains lives of Gildas, Aldhelm, 

Bede, Boniface, Wilfrid, the apochryphal story of Harold Godwin- 
son's survival of Hastings (pp. 38 ff.), etc. 
Lydgate, John, 

Minor Poems, E. E. T. S., 107 E. S., ed., H. N. MacCracken, 1911. 



78 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, (transl. from French of Deguileville), 
E. E. T. S., 77 E. S., ed., Furnivall and Locock, 1899-1904. 

Reason and Sensuality, E. E. T, S., 84 E. S., E. Sieper, 1901. 

Secrees of the Olde Philosoifres, E. E. T. S., (:6 E. S., ed., R. Steele, 
1894. 

Serpent of Division, ed., H. N. MacCracken, Yale University Press, 
191 1. 

Story of Thebes, E. E. T. S., 108 E. S., ed., A. Erdmann, 191 1. 

Temple of Glas, E. E. T. S., 60 E. S., ed., J. Schick, 1891. 

Troy Book, E. E. T. S., 97 E. S., ed., Henry Bergen, 1906. 
Malory, Thomas, 

(iCaxton's ed.) ed., by H. O. Sommer, London, iSSg. 
Mannyng, Robert, of Brunne, 

Handlyng Synne, E. E. T. ,S., 119 O. S., ed., F. J. Furnivall, 1901. 
Map, Walter, 

De Nugis Curialium, ed., M. R. James, Oxford, 1914; 

Latin Poems, ed., Thomas Wright, London, 1841 ; 

comment on De Nugis in P. M. L. A., 32, pp. 81-132. 
Marcabrun, 

Works, ed., J. M. L. Dejeanne, Toulouse, 1909. 
Matthew of Paris, 

Rolls, 57 (7 parts), ed., H. R. Luard, 1874. 
Metham, John, 

Works, E. E. T. S., 132 O. S., ed., Hardin Craig, 1916. 
Minor Poems of the Vernon Ms., 

E. E. T. S., 98 O. S., ed., €. Horstmann, 1892. 
Mitchel, Dan, 

Ayenbite of Inwyt, E. E. T. S., 23 O. S., ed., R. Morris, 1866. 
Morte Arthure, 

E. E. T. S., 8 O. S., ed., E. Brock, 1865. 
Old English Homilies, 

E. E. T. S., 29 O. 5., ed., R. Morris, 1868. 
Osbert of Clara, 

Letters, and poem to Henry H., Ca. So., 5, pp. 109-21 1. 
The Pearl, 

E. E. T. S., I O. S., ed., Richard Morris, 1864. 
Pecock, R., 

Repressor, Rolls, 19, 2 parts, ed., C. Babington, i860. 
Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini, 

Ed., E. Duemmler, Berlin, 1881. 
Priscian, 

Institutionum Grammaticarum Libri, K, Vol. H-IIL 
Quintilian, 

Institutes of Oratory, Bohn transl., J. S. Watson. 



I 



BIBLIOGRAPHY yg 

Rabanus Maurus, 

Works, M., 107-112. 
Robert of Gloucester, 

Rolls, 86 (2 parts), ed., W. A. Wright, 1887. 
Servatus Lupus, 

Letters, Bibliotheque de I'ficole des Hautes fitudes Sciences, Philo- 
logiques, et Historiques, vol. 77. 
Skelton, John, 

Poems, 3 vols., ed. based on Dyce, Boston, 1864. 
Sulpitius Victor, 

Institutiones Oratoriae, H., pp. 313-352. 
Trevisa, John of, 

V. sub Higden. The dialogue about translation is also in Pollard, 
E. G., I, pp. 203-210. 
Tybinus, Nicolaus, 

Treatise on rhyme. Ma., pp. 467-487. 
Usk, Thomas, 

Testament of Love, in Skeat's The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 
Oxford, 1894, vol. 7. 
Venantius Fortunatus, 

Opera Omnia, etc., Rome, 1786. 
Vices and Virtues, 

E. E. T. ,S., 89 O. S., ed., F. Holthausen, 1888. 
Victor, C. lulius, 

Ars Rhetorica, H., pp. 373^448. 
Walter of Dervy, 

Letters, Ca. So., 9 ed., €. Messiter, 1850. 
Wars of Alexander, 

E. E. T. S., 47 E. S., ed., W. W. Skeat, 1886. 
Wicliff, John, 

English Works, E. E. T. .S., 74 O. S., ed., F. A. Matthew, 1880; also 
(selections) by Thomas Arnold, Oxford, 1869, 3 vols. 

Latin Works, Wyclif Society, London, 1882, 191 1. 

Epistle to the Romans, ed., E. C. Tucker, Yale Studies in English 49 
(1914). 

Purvey's Chapter on Translation is in Pollard, E. G., I, pp. 193-199. 
William of Malmesbury, 

Gesta Regum Anglorum, Rolls, 90, (2 parts), ed., Wm. Stubbs, 1887. 

Gesta Pontificum, Ibid., 52, ed., N. E. S. A. Hamilton, 1870. 
William of Palerne, 

E. E. T. ,S., I E. S., ed., W. W. Skeat, 1867. 
Willibald, 

Life of Boniface, Ca. So., 16, pp. 157-197. 



8o BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Wilson, Thomas, 

Arte of Rhetorique, (1585 ed.) ed., G. A. Mair, Oxford, 1909 (Tudor 
and Stuart Library). 

III. Special Articles, Treatises, Etc. 

ABBREVIATIONS 

C. S. Chaucer Society. 

M. B. .Muenchner Beitraege zur Romanischen und EngHschen Philologie, 

(Leipzig, 1890 to 1912). 
M. L. N. Modern Language Notes, 1886 to date, Baltimore. 
M. P. Modern Philology, 1903 to date. University of Chicago Press. 
P. M. L. A, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1885 

to date, Baltimore. 
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; . , BIBLIOGRAPHY gl 

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